imaginative-inquiryhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk
The greatest resource we have in the classroom is the children's imaginationWed, 21 Jan 2015 17:41:27 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1KS3 MoE History Project: The Mystery of the Young Monkhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/ks3-moe-history-project-the-mystery-of-the-young-monk/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/ks3-moe-history-project-the-mystery-of-the-young-monk/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 17:40:54 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1548From January until July 2015 I am working on a project funded by the Hamlyn Foundation called, “Becoming, Belonging and Participating in School Communities”.

The project involves using imaginative-inquiry with students who are struggling with the transition from primary to secondary school.

1. As the History Team website: for the fictional team of historians represented by the students. We will add content and resources as the project develops, as well as examples of the students’ work.

2. As a teaching resource: which we hope will help other teachers who would like to use the context in their own teaching.

3. As a medium for communicating the outcomes of the project as they progress. We aim to update the website with feedback from the students, their parents, and the teachers as it comes in.

If you have any questions or would like to make a comment, please get in contact, either using the comment box at the bottom of this page or using our contact form. Please bear in mind the website will be ‘live’ and so there are bound to mistakes and typos, if you spot any please let me know via @imagineinquiry

I expect this project is going to keep me very busy over the next six months and I won’t have the time to blog on here as often as I have in the past, sorry about that. In the meantime I hope you will visit the History Team website. My aim is to update it as often as possible and publish a summary on here every week, we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve posted it here as screen grapes from the GooleBooks page, consequently the quality is not great. If you prefer you can download it as a pdf here.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/on-dorothy-heathcote-by-cecily-oneill/feed/0Student Questionnairehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/student-questionnaire/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/student-questionnaire/#commentsWed, 14 Jan 2015 15:17:20 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1517This student questionnaire is designed to be used with students in Year 7 who are currently struggling with issues around transition. It is part of a research project called Becoming, Belonging and Participating in School Communities, funded by the Hamlyn Foundation, which is being conducted between January and July 2015 in three High Schools in Norfolk and Suffolk.
This is a second draft of the questionnaire and we would very much appreciate any feedback or suggests, particularly in regards to questions or categories of questions. Please use the boxes provided to record your thoughts.
Thank you for your participation, Tim Taylor and Tim Allard.

Student Questionnaire:
Please estimate where you think you are currently on a five-point scale:
1 = Very high
2 = High
3 = Middle
4 = Low
5 = Very low

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/student-questionnaire/feed/0A Meeting With Tristram Hunthttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/a-meeting-with-tristram-hunt/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/a-meeting-with-tristram-hunt/#commentsFri, 09 Jan 2015 21:16:40 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1511For years, we’ve been asking politicians to stop meddling in education and give us the time and space to do our jobs, as well as the opportunity to draw-breath and have a proper in-depth review of the whole system. Not a behind closed doors vanity project, driven by one man’s ideological dogma, but a proper grown-up debate that acknowledges the mess we are in, the mistakes of the past, and the serious complexities of teaching and learning.

Well – fingers-crossed (and toes for that matter) – we might really be able to have one after the next election, if things go well.

Today, @thought_weavers, @Cherrylkd, @debrakidd and myself braved the high winds and rain of blustery Stoke-on-Trent, to sit in a tiny room with the man who hopefully is going to be the next Secretary of State for Education, Tristram Hunt.

And a very constructive meeting it was too.

Mr. Hunt was friendly, open, and, most importantly as far as I’m concerned, genuinely prepared to listen. He answered all our questions fully and frankly, admitted the difficulties facing the education system (particularly in regards to finance), and took all of our suggestions seriously. There was no attempt to steer the debate to his benefit or to hijack the meeting with his own agenda. The over-all impression was of that rarest of things, a politician who is going to give time and space for debate and isn’t going to rush into office, with a barrel full of reforms, the moment he’s given the keys to the DfE.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of everything we discussed, but these are the highlights for me:

1. A promise there will be no more meddling with the Primary Curriculum, so we’re stuck with it, warts an all. Which I say is a good thing, the last thing we need is another round of curriculum ‘reform’.

2. He agreed with David Bell, the former Chief Inspector, who has called for an end to constant political interference and the establishment of an independent body to set long-term policy, separated from the shifting demands of party politics.

3. He agreed we need a full, open, and frank discussion on the role and use of levels for assessment. We told him the new performance descriptors are a disaster and universally hated by everyone in education. We pointed him at the Tim Oates interview on YouTube for more information on the subject.

4. We bent his ear about SATs and told him teacher assessment would be a much better and cheaper method. We agreed accountability is essential, but so is trust in the professional judgment of teachers. He genuinely listened, asked some supplementary questions and seemed to be really considering our suggestions. I have hope one day SATs will end, one day.

5. We told him everyone thought the term ‘Master Teacher’ was a mistake. He quietly conceded and asked what we thought would be a better suggestion. We said it would be best to ask Twitter and that we would be happy to do it for him, which we will. So, have a think, what would be a better name for a type of teacher who stays in the classroom to develop their skills to a high level through research, practice, and reflection? It can’t be AST.

6. He talked at some length about Labour’s vision for education, about drawing on the past and looking to the future, social justice, social mobility, the use of the power of the state to break down disadvantage, the great challenge of building a sustainable workforce in the face of international competition, and the development of a highly trained, educated, and skilled workforce. He made it clear he doesn’t want the education system to be instrumentalist; he wants kids to enjoy learning, be happy, and to develop themselves as successful people. Which was music to my ears.

7. He said PRP is going to stay, but it will be an option for schools, not enforced by central government. He said, the head-teachers he talks to are generally in favour.

My over-all impression was of a man who really wants to make a difference, not by rushing in and telling everyone what to do, but by listening, talking, and considering things at length.

He’s got my vote.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2015/01/a-meeting-with-tristram-hunt/feed/0Stephen Ball: The Education Debatehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/stephen-ball-the-education-debate/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/stephen-ball-the-education-debate/#commentsSat, 20 Dec 2014 17:27:53 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1505Have you ever wondered how government ministers can keep a straight face while making extravagant speeches about giving freedoms to schools and trusting teachers? If we judge them on their record it seems almost impossible they actually believe what they are saying.

In 2010, for example, Michael Gove proclaimed during an interview with Andrew Marr, “I’m a decentraliser. I believe in trusting professionals.

Was it a barefaced lie or did he mean it? The evidence would seem to speak for itself. When he became Secretary of State for Education the first thing he did was convince parliament to give him fifty new powers and, when he was sacked four years later, he left a profession more demoralized, over-worked, and underappreciated than at any time in living memory.

Stephen Ball’s book on the history of modern education, ‘The Education Debate’, does an excellent job of explaining why politicians and educationalists often see the function of schooling in very different ways and why it is possible Michael Gove and other education ministers might really believe what they are saying is true.

Ball’s main argument is that education policy has become increasingly dominated by economic imperatives over the last twenty-five years. And, as a result, successive Governments – Conservative, Labour, and coalition – have recalibrated the school system to perform at the service of economic productivity and international competitiveness.

These have become the new benchmarks to measure the success of our education system and take precedence over all other considerations. Thus, while certain ideas, topics, and speakers are given precedence, others are marginalised and excluded from the debate.

In the same way as the pigs in Animal Farm justify their new powers and progressively draconian control to be in the best interests of everyone on the farm, so the politicians at the DfE, under Gove’s banner, ‘Decentralisation and Trust for Teachers’, have increasingly turned the screw on performance and accountability, yet claim, at the same time, they are ushering in a new era of freedom and professionalism.

This is the rhetoric of central government management, where every reform and every policy is justified in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, and every voice of opposition, or questioner of authority, is an Enemy of Promise.

To understand how Michael Gove, and the other coalition ministers, might actually believe their own words, we have to understand how they are able to hold two apparently contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time and believe both of them to be true. The first is that schools really have been given new freedoms – that is freedom from local authority bureaucracy – and that the controls of central government, are not the same as the controls of local government: central government, good, local government, bad. The second is that the systems of monitoring and accountability – national tests, league tables, and Ofsted – are a necessary and desirable part of the system and display no lack of trust in teachers. Those that complain are framed as part of the problem, as Gove told headteachers: “If you think Ofsted is causing you fear I am grateful for your candour, but we are going to have to part company… I’m not going to stop demanding higher standards.”

From the standpoint of a politician this is an entirely reasonable position, who, after all, would not be on the side of progress and reform? Schools, they maintain, have been released from the dead hand of LA bureaucracy so they are now free to concentrate and perform on those things that really matter.

What really matters? Those things determined by the Secretary of State to be in the best interests of society, family, and the economy.

On the one hand the politicians can make claims about freedoms, decentralization, and trusting professionals, while on the other they can maintain control and organise the system from the centre.

The ‘Education Debate’ does a very good job of explaining how we have reached this sorry state of affairs. In particular how Margaret Thatcher’s determination to downgrade teacher’s views and to judge schools using national tests and a government controlled inspection service, have very largely won the day. As Ball argues, “there is a crisis of trust, new and overbearing forms of accountability distort the proper aims of professional practice and rest on control rather than integrity.”

What we have left is a system where the covenant between government, society, and schools has largely broken down. To be replaced by a culture of terror, where a regime of accountability employs judgments, comparisons, and targets as a means of control, and where an individual’s worth is measured in terms of their productivity and value to the system.

Not really surprising Gove left this out of his Andrew Marr interview.

This review was first published in Teach Primary Magazine and is re-published here with their kind permission.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/stephen-ball-the-education-debate/feed/0Biesta: The Beautiful Risk of Educationhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/biesta-the-beautiful-risk-of-education/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/biesta-the-beautiful-risk-of-education/#commentsSat, 13 Dec 2014 09:21:02 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1500We seem to be in the process of creating an education system that strives to reduce all risks whilst making ever-greater demands. The new system tells our students they have to work harder, be more productive, and aim ever higher, but is not prepared to allow them simple freedoms or opportunities to make choices and to decide things for themselves. It is a mechanistic system of control and productivity that sees qualifications as the over-riding purpose of education.

Recently I read a blog written by a teacher at a high performing academy where the students are required to move around in total silence and are told where to sit at lunchtime. This is justified because some students find social situations difficult and silence ensures minimum disruption between lessons. But is this level of control desirable? Is it even educational?

Gert Biesta, in “The Beautiful Risk of Education”, argues systems of this kind have got their priorities out of balance. They are efficient at maintaining the status quo and at reproducing what already exists, but are useless if what we want from education is students who can think and make judgements for themselves – “free subjects rather than docile objects”.

For Biesta, education has three aims: the attainment of academic qualifications, socialisation into a community, and ‘subjectification’ – becoming a wise human being. He understands there is a tension between these three aims and that the purpose of education is to find a productive balance. If one or more of the aims is allowed to dominate the others then the education of the students will suffer.

The problem with the new system approach is that the aims of student attainment and socialisation have been privileged above subjectification and this has led to the development of an instrumental (as well as dehumanising and dysfunctional) process of schooling, that might get better results, but exacts a terrible cost.

To become a wise person requires experience, it is not something learnt from a book, but something developed over time through experience and reflection. If we deny students opportunities to take risks, make mistakes, and experiment with power, then we deny them opportunities to develop wisdom and to learn how to become responsible ‘grown up’ human beings.

This is the ‘risk’ of education in the title of Biesta’s book. The risk we have to take as teachers if we are to allow our students experiences of freedom and responsibility. As well as the risk of engaging with ambiguity and complexity in a system prepared to share power and decision-making.

The new system justifies high levels of control and risk-reduction by claiming they are acting in the best interests of the students. By limiting their options and requiring simple obedience and hard work, the new system claims it gives students the best chance they have to realise their potential. This is particularly true, they claim, of the poor who are disadvantaged from the beginning by their badly educated parents. This is evangelical education. An approach that justifies the means by the ends, and claims other less regimented approaches have low expectations.

But, as Biesta points out, we don’t ‘produce’ our students: they are not products of our schools they are human beings with agency and minds of their own. The idea of emancipating the poor through education, in a system that denies them freedom and the power to influence, is patronising and self-justifying. In fact it’s not education at all, but a system of schooling that puts the interests of the system and the economy above those of its subjects. Freedom is not something people are educated into, but something education is for. There is no graduation date for becoming a human being and having the rights of a person. And as much as we tell ourselves we are doing it on their behalf, we do not have the right to control children’s every move.

Biesta’s book is a challenging read. It is academic and heavy going in parts, but it shines a bright light on the mistakes we have made in the past and the new ones we are beginning to make for the future. He is not interested in apportioning blame or looking for scapegoats, rather he understands education is a complex multifaceted business and most people are working hard with good intentions. The problems we have, he argues, are created because we have never clearly decided on the purpose of education – what it is for and for whom. Until we do, we will continue to repeat the makes of the past.

I’m convinced by Biesta’s plea for balance. Education is not about denying children knowledge, opportunities to belong, or chances to experience freedom and responsibility. It is about striving to find methods that embrace all three and give our students the best chance they have to become educationally wise human beings.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/biesta-the-beautiful-risk-of-education/feed/0Some principles for debating on edTwitterhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/some-principles-for-debating-on-edtwitter/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/some-principles-for-debating-on-edtwitter/#commentsSun, 07 Dec 2014 10:42:54 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1491One of the main reasons I enjoy being on Twitter is the chance to discuss education with teachers all over the world. It is a great forum for bringing people together. However, occasionally things go wrong and people fall out.

You may have noticed a large schism has opened up in the last few months on edTwitter as more and more people have got sick of the bickering and have started blocking and muting opposition voices.

There is, as we all know, a wide spectrum of thought in education and much disagreement over pedagogy and curriculum. This has created a thriving and lively community and much interesting and, on the whole, productive debate. However, on occasions, this liveliness gets too heated and boils over into anger, animosity, and, all too quickly, a break down in communication.

This can’t be healthy. Dialogue is good, we learn by being introduced to new ideas and having our own ideas tested. We can’t have those conversations if we block or mute any views that don’t agree with our own. At its best edTwitter is a crucible for new thinking and challenging old assumptions (take a look at the great debate happening over Growth Mindset). At its worst, it’s a kind of Deadwood – lawless and chaotic. A place where people close their shutters and stay away from trouble.

I’ve come to the conclusion we need to grow up as a community and start agreeing on some principles. I see this happening all the time, in a kind of ad-hoc way, between individuals who agree to disagree. They argue passionately, fail to find a common ground, but agree to respect each other’s point of view. It’s not easy and it takes a large amount of good will, but it is possible.

The following list are some suggestions, they are far from a complete list and require some refining, sixteen is not a memorable number. Please offer your suggestions. They represent only a starting point. And they are principles, not laws. We don’t need a sherif.

Some principles for debating on edTwitter…

1. Strive first to understand and then to be understood.

2. Tone is important. Make an effort not to offend, politeness is a sign of culture.

3. Admit when you’re wrong or have made a mistake. Nothing weakens your credibility more than arguing a lost cause.

4. Be honest with yourself about the faults in your own argument. Changing your mind is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of learning.

5. Avoid sophistry.

6. Making wide generalisations and grand theories is a sign of lazy thinking. Reality is complex.

7. Don’t evade or try to change the subject of the debate. If you do it is a sign your argument is weak.

8. Don’t interpret your interlocutor’s feelings or motivations, they are not for you to interpret.

9. Don’t tell your interlocutor their faults. Nothing is more likely to offend and has nothing to do with the argument.

10. Avoid labelling and categorising other people, it’s lazy thinking and likely to be considered rude.

12. Avoid calling your interlocutor’s argument a Bad Argument. This is not a substitute for reason and is likely to be considered rude.

13. Winning is not everything. The purpose of debate is to promote thinking, not to impose your point of view.

14. Try to be aware of your own faults. We all have them.

15. If you make a mistake, delete it. That’s what it’s for.

16. Know when to stop.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/12/some-principles-for-debating-on-edtwitter/feed/3The End of Levels: An opportunity or another fine mess?http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/11/the-end-of-levels-an-opportunity-or-another-fine-mess/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/11/the-end-of-levels-an-opportunity-or-another-fine-mess/#commentsMon, 10 Nov 2014 17:28:07 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1471The DfE has published a 44 page document listing the proposed Performance Descriptors for KS 1&2. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it yet. It is potentially the most explosive hand-grenade thrown into primary education for twenty years.

I’ve read it twice now and I’m still struggling to understand how it is supposed to work. The notes below represent my current thinking, I’d be very interested in hearing what others think.

While reading the report it’s also worth considering the answers Tim Oates, the principle architect of the National Curriculum, gives about assessment in this recent interview. There seems to be considerable ambiguity, even contradictions, between what he says are the intentions of the National Curriculum and the draft Performance Descriptors.

As far as I’m concerned there is not much to disagree with in the Oates interview and we should welcome his recommendations to deepen learning experiences in Primary education. However, the Performance Descriptors are unwieldy and cumbersome. Far from ensuring greater depth and understanding they represent yet another surge of paperwork and more opportunities for the data-trackers and number crunchers to make money counting beans.

This is the list. It consists of seven consultants, a director, an adviser, and a moderation manager. However, despite the DfE saying the experts included teachers, none of these people work in schools, either as teachers or as school leaders.

What does this tell us?
– The DfE were ‘economical’ with the truth when they said who drafted the PDs
– None of these people will ever have to use the descriptors with children
– None will have to tell parents their child is ‘below standard’
– None will be held accountable for assessing their students’ progress using PDs
– None will have to do the extra admin that goes with the PDs
– None will have to cope with the stress and increased workload

This is not a criticism of the experts themselves, who all might be excellent in their field, it is an observation about how the DfE creates policy and extra workload without involving, even at a cursory level, the very people who will have to implement it. Is it any wonder that the PDs have been greeted with such universal alarm and derision by the teaching profession?

The Performance Descriptors are long and potentially confusing for parents (and teachers)

They are in many cases ambiguous, even contradictory

For example, Reading at the end of KS2 is assessed using a test and then marked externally. How can the test make a judgment on PDs such as: “Demonstrates a positive attitude to reading by frequently reading for pleasure, both fiction and non-fiction”?

Are the descriptors listed in any particular order? What if enjoyment of reading is damaged by the over prescription of phonics? Should teachers make a decision which one is more important?

How are schools going to assess progress towards these end of KS? AND how are ofsted going to judge the school’s methods? They will want to see data tracking students year by year, but the PDs are only meant for the end of KSs.

Will data tracking software use ‘levels’ measured by numbers? Highlighting students who are not making sufficient progress? If so, we’re back to square one.

Seems inevitable schools will use ‘best fit’ models, which is one of the criticisms of levels
And will use the year-by-year curriculum objectives to ‘level’ students and track their progress. Especially if this is what Ofsted expect.

Do we know who the ‘experts’ were who wrote this? Will the DfE tell us?

Are the experts available to explain their thinking and the rationale behind the draft?

The draft poses many unanswered questions that really need to be answered if this isn’t going to be (another) complete muddle. Like levels.

Notes on the Tim Oates interview:

– In the new national curriculum, children study fewer things in great depth
– securing deep learning in central ideas
– understanding key concepts rather than moving quickly through levels
– Children have learnt to label themselves using levels
– levels result in undue pace and a focus on maximum progress through the levels
– deep secure understanding is not the same as levels
– The problems with levels: 1. they don’t really capture learning; 2. teachers make a ‘best match’ even though children haven’t grasped key ideas; 3. Idea of ‘just in’, passed the threshold, distorts assessment of learning
– so, levels are incoherent
– other nations don’t use levels (Wroxham School has never used levels)
– totally different conception of ability, levels get in the way of ability
– new curriculum emphasis key concepts
– “the new curriculum is chock full of skills”
– year sequence doesn’t have to be followed slavishly
– assessment focused on enabling teachers to select questions to see if they have grasped a key concept
– not enough assessment of the right kind, rich probing of ideas and supportive of learning
– don’t want children to move with undue pace thru NC
– “clear progressive statements” children are ready to move on
– children produce a lot in high performing schools – children producing stuff means teachers can get an insight into their learning
– children are producing a lot, writing a lot, talking a lot
– teachers will need to be experts in assessment – think hard in terms of the questions they ask children
– assessment “kleptomaniacs”

On October 13th and 14th, 2014 Jane Manzone – @heymisssmith – and I will be teaching in her class using mantle of the expert. During the intervening two weeks we will plan the context together using this webpage to record our work.

Theme: Space
Students: 30, Year 6

Jane

Background

My Year 6 class currently have a Connected Curriculum topic entitled ‘Out of This World’. It is a Science based topic but I am linking most of my Literacy, my Art (Starry Sky Van Gogh) my Music (Holst) and some Humanities to this. We are reading a book called ‘The Portal’ by Andrew Norriss. My class have expressed an interest in the idea of intergalactic travel. Today a child asked me if there was life somewhere else in the universe.

Initial Ideas

Bearing all this in mind, I thought we could devise a Mantle around the idea of a space crew discovering a portal which took them to a far part of the galaxy and maybe to a fabled ‘counter earth’? I have also shared a book called ‘Mrs Moore in Space’ (by Patrick Moore’s mother) there are lots of aliens and a counter earth in that.

Ultimately I would like them to think about adaptations alien life may have evolved to suit particular climates or terrains. Also I want to do a DT project at some point this term where they make an alien and a landscape. It would be good to get lunar and solar orbits and some Maths into the mantle somehow. Really I am sure we could go anywhere with it. I haven’t done any history yet, and I would quite like to talk to them about how people used to view the universe when we thought the earth was flat…. the idea of progress. Could we time travel somehow?

What do you think?

Tim

Thanks Jane. I’ve bought the Andrew Norriss book and will read it over the weekend.

As you know the ‘mantle’ represents the responsibilities and power the experts have in the fictional context. So, we will need to decide at some point on the three mantle aspects of the fictional frame:
– The expert team (the team of professionals)
– The client (who they work for)
– The commission (the purpose of their work)

However, it is often worth thinking around a context and the curriculum first before making a decision on the specifics.

With that in mind I’d like to ask you a few questions, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have all the answers, some of these things can be decided by the students. At the moment we’re just thinking around the context about the ‘givens’ and the ‘negotiables’.

– Do you want the creatures on the fictional world to parallel earth and, if so, to what extent?
– Or, do you want the fictional world to be alien?
– Or, perhaps you want an essentially human world but with alien interaction?
– Is the context set in the future or present day?
– Is the portal found or created?

Some thoughts

It probably makes sense to have the portal on the moon because of the curriculum you want the students to explore.
We might make your student’s question: Is there life elsewhere in the universe? the central inquiry question and the team’s commission.

Jane

Today I took my class across the road to the park where we measured out the Solar System. We only got as far as Saturn because we ran out of space in the park! The children now have a slight frame of reference for scale, but I still feel they need something extra to really ‘feel’ the enormity of space.

Upon return we completed a quiz, and although they remembered the order and sizes, I was surprised one child thought there was water on Mars. This made me think an investigation into what the chemical make up of the planets in our solar system, and why no life could be there might be the best starting point. We have written poems personifying Mars and Venus, so I’d like the children to investigate those two.

In the book there are many portals that take travellers to different ‘Federation’ worlds in the galaxy; it might be good to use that as a basis for our narrative. Maybe our second portal (after our moon) could be on one of Saturn’s moons? As we stopped there in the park today.We could continue the imaginary journey to the edge of the solar system until they find another portal to another system that mirrors ours but still in the Milky Way.

I think we need an essentially human world with alien interaction and maybe human like creatures on our counter earth. Should the children perhaps have to work out how to create a portal? One girl in my class is reading Northern Lights; I have mentioned to them all that in The Subtle Knife the characters have to do that.

Some other ideas for the commission I had, were: deciding what to take with them from earth, to create a new world, or, to report back on the new planets discovered through the portals to make a database.

Tim

Hi Jane, sorry its taken me a while to get back. This all sounds great. I love the portals idea, full of possibilities!

Have the children decided whether they make the portals, discover them, or are they made by someone else?

I like the idea of travelling through the portal to discover a world on the other side. It could be either the first time anyone has travelled through a portal or where portal travel is routine. Which do you think?

It might be worth taking a look at the tensions list and thinking about where the different tensions could arise. The obvious ones are – the herculean task, dangers known in advance, and uncontrollable threats. But some of the others might also come into play, such as Level 12 loss of faith in companions.

Have you given any thought to the ‘expert’ elements?
– The expert team
– The client
– The commission

Reading through you notes I might suggest:
– A team of space explorers (maybe like the early Star Treckers)?
– A big earth based organisation, like NASA?
– To explore the new world and bring back information (possibly without revealing their identity or disturbing the historical development of the world)?

This would bring in the curriculum we discussed above about the chemical make up of the planets and conditions for life. We could use the poems as part of the team’s history. There is a LOT we could do here, exploring events from the past – failed missions, contact with alien life, times when things went badly wrong (but somehow we survived)! Would create masses of reasons for writing – reports, diary entries, logs, messages home, newspaper reports etc.

After the curriculum, the expert framing elements, and tensions, the next planning elements are:
– Points of view
– Team activities and tasks
– Narrative events

Let me know what you think.

Jane

Hi Tim,

Thanks for this.

Since I last wrote about this my class have been busy inventing aliens and describing them in non chronological report. They are now inventing and describing a planet. They really enjoyed the Literacy Shed adaptation of the Avatar trailer, and have been inspired to write very detailed and imaginative descriptions. This makes me think they will do well as space explorers and will bring lots of ideas to the mantle.

We have begun looking at animal adaptations in Science in order to think about how aliens might also be adapted to unusual climates or terrains; this might be useful expert knowledge.

They are very interested in the character of Uncle Larry in The Portal, and all suspect him of some sort of shady dealing. I think if they travelled through a portal they would like a mystery to solve.

Saying that, I also think they might like to imagine the aliens were also a hazard.

I think they should be tasked to either find out lots of information to bring back, or maybe rescue some people who have become stranded on the planet, who might be surviving there?

J

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/my-ideas/feed/6Dorothy Heathcote had her critics toohttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/dorothy-heathcote-also-had-her-critics/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/dorothy-heathcote-also-had-her-critics/#commentsWed, 24 Sep 2014 15:28:44 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1416I’ve been digging around in the Heathcote archive for the last few days researching the origins of mantle of the expert for a Chapter in a book.

Finding a definitive date for when Dorothy first used the term has been frustrating. The earliest dated document mentioning ‘mantle of the expert’ is an article written by Heathcote for the Secondary School Theatre Journal, in 1975.

However, Sandra Heston proposes 1972 in her PhD thesis. As evidence she sites a paper which she says was authored by Heathcote in that year [See Appendix 10, p. 216). However, when I searched for the document itself in the archive it turned out to be neither dated nor attributed. Which is strange.

Not to worry, I’m sure there is a perfectly valid explanation. Sandra was a close friend of Dorothy’s and it is likely Dorothy recognised the document and gave Heston the date. I’ll write to her and ask. Mystery solved.

Well, not quite. The original is really quite odd [Ref. AC115].

As you can see it is type-written in a style that is easily recognisable as Heathcote’s. The mystery is in the hand-written notes, whose are these? And why did Dorothy keep them in her possession? They are hardly complimentary:

Mantle of the Expert – “Does this mean the teacher?”

…a commitment from the children to learn the information and the skills they will need. – “It would never work with Class 3!!!”

A discipline for the class which provides a framework in which attitudes are contained without the teacher imposing rules and demands. – “Tell that to Mr. Wilson!”

Children employ what they already know and no information will be fed to them first. – “Class 3 didn’t seem to know much anyway”

…teachers can diagnose what children know already. – “Nothing!”

Apparently the other person, whoever they are, was not a fan. Dorothy had some stern critics in her time.

As it turns out, I later found the same information elsewhere in the archive, but this time without the handwritten notes [ref. AI042].

It would seem Dorothy was unperturbed by her detractor and carried on regardless. She was a dauntless woman, unafraid to take on the knockers… a lesson worth remembering for us all.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/dorothy-heathcote-also-had-her-critics/feed/2KIPP: The difference between teaching, training, and indoctrinationhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/kipp-the-difference-between-teaching-and-training/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/kipp-the-difference-between-teaching-and-training/#commentsTue, 16 Sep 2014 14:05:32 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1408A Teacher who is prepared to have their practice recorded and posted online deserves respect. I’ve done it myself and it’s a risk.

I would, therefore, like to make it clear from the beginning this blog is not an attack on the teacher in the film. I’m not going to comment on her style or the way she speaks. I am, instead, going to discuss the strategy she uses with the children and then offer an opinion on why I think it is flawed.

To my mind this is a legitimate subject for inquiry, the strategies we use in school are the tools of our profession and require thoughtful analysis and evaluation.

The video

The session

Some observations:

The session is well rehearsed. The adults in the room seem to know their roles well and are going through a familiar routine.

The aim of the session is to train the children to behave in a particular way decided by the school for a particular purpose.

The behaviour the adults want the children to adopt is tracking. Tracking involves watching the teacher at all times while they talk.

The children are told they should track the teacher while they are talking because “unless you are tracking the speaker with your eyes you can’t listen”.

The children are not involved in a discussion about why the school thinks the behaviour is advantageous or asked about their own strategies for ‘good listening’. They are simply told what to do and why to do it.

The children see the behaviour modelled by adults and then practice it as a class until it becomes part of their own ways of behaving.

They are rewarded by lots of praise and kind words.

There is a clear message the adults will be patient while the children learn the new behaviour, but no conversation about whether they find tracking useful or whether there might be other strategies for effective listening.

We are told those children who don’t get the message are kept behind to discuss it further.

The teacher makes it clear the adults don’t view this as a punishment.

Some thoughts

1. Is it true people can’t listen unless they are tracking the speaker?

Not in my experience.

I can listen quite well without looking at the speaker: in fact it is often easier and less distracting. I understand from reading other people’s thoughts this is not an uncommon experience.

I, also, have no difficulty listening to the radio or audio-books – two media where the speaker is not visible.

I suspect most children will quickly come to the same conclusion. If they close their eyes or look away they can still hear their teacher. And what about blind people?

I wonder what conclusions the children will come to once they realise their teachers have been telling them nonsense? And what will they think of tracking?

2. If it’s not for listening, what is the purpose of tracking?

I’d suggest feedback.

Tracking gives feedback to the teacher about children’s levels of engagement. It is very difficult as a speaker to tell if people are really listening, especially if they don’t look like they are listening – they are staring out the window, doodling, spinning round, poking the person in front of them.

Tracking would seem to indicate more attentiveness, particularly if it is accompanied by smiles, nods of approval, and the occasional polite question.

So, why don’t the adults tell the children this is why they want them to track?

I suspect because what underlies the approach is an assumption that children don’t need to know why. They just need to do what they are told.

It’s possible the adults don’t know the truth themselves and really do believe people can only listen when they are looking at the speaker.

3. So, the strategy of tracking is fine if we make a slight modification?

Well, no. Not really.

The problem with the approach goes deeper. It’s all about the difference between teaching children and training them. When we teach children we put the focus on learning, when we train them we put the focus on obedience.

The method used in the video does not require the children to think beyond doing what they are told and believing the adults. They need do no more than comply. If they comply they are rewarded by kindness, if they do not comply they are required to stay behind.

There is no discussion about why the strategy works, who it works for, or if it is the best one to use for those people doing the listening. The word for this is indoctrination, it’s a strong word because it carries many negative connotations, but in this case it seems to fit the definition: “teach (a person or group) to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.”

The method used in the video (and I assume universally across the KIPP schools) does not involve questioning or discussing the strategy of tracking, it merely requires those involved to do as they told, uncritically.

I suggest this is not good education.

Of course any person joining a community needs to learn the social norms, expectations, and conventions of that community. A significant role of education is to teach children how to operate successfully with other people in a place where they can’t always do as they please. This can be a difficult process for some children, especially if their home background has not prepared them sufficiently for the demands of school.

However, this does not justify the kinds of training methods that indoctrinate people into a prescribed set of beliefs uncritically. Not unless you think children are different from other kinds of people and, as adults, we are entitled to treat them differently.

4. Should we treat children in the same way we treat adults?

No. But we should certainly treat them with the same level of respect.

Children cannot be free in the same way adults are. They can’t just decide to leave school and do what they like. We can’t allow them the same liberties and opportunities we give to grown ups. But we can treat them with just as much respect and dignity.

Freedom is not the same as licence. None of us have the licence to do as we please. We all have to operate within limits – legal, social, financial, environmental – and children are just the same. Only they have more limits than adults. This is the truth of living within a society.

I believe we should teach this to children. Being free is not about doing what you like, when you like, it is about thinking about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and having opportunities to affect your environment.

By not teaching children these truths or giving them opportunities to think critically about the choices they make, or the communities they live in we are denying them an important part of their education.

The problem I have with the strategy used in the video is that it is imposed, uncritically, upon the children in the class, without genuine discussion or understanding. It is not about learning or what the students themselves need, it is about adult control and compliance. It is teacher-centred pedagogy, where the adults know best and children are treated as people without the same rights as other human beings.

Some people point towards the academic success of the KIPP system (although there are some questions about this too) and say the ends justify the means.

I beg to differ.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/kipp-the-difference-between-teaching-and-training/feed/12There is no right way to teach everythinghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/there-is-no-right-way-to-teach-everything/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/there-is-no-right-way-to-teach-everything/#commentsFri, 12 Sep 2014 18:07:47 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1402When I was learning to drive I had an instructor. He sat next to me in the car and told me what to do until I knew enough to take the test and go out on my own.

This method worked, but it took me two years. I was a very lazy student.

I don’t believe, however, that giving me the keys and telling me to discover how to do it be myself would have been a better method. Honestly, I would probably have ended up crashing and killing someone.

I also doubt teaching me using a textbook would have prepared me any better. I might have known a lot ‘about’ driving (if I’d paid attention), but knowing ‘how’ to drive would have remained a complete mystery. To learn ‘how’ to drive I needed to get in the car and push the pedals with my (infinitely patient) instructor sitting beside me giving me support and guidance. This is how most people learn how to drive. It’s the best approach because the teaching and learning method (supervised practise) matches the curriculum.

And, what’s true for learning to drive is also true for other kinds of learning.

If you work in a primary school the curriculum is large and diverse and involves a wide variety of different skills and subjects.

These skills and subjects are not all of the same kind but fall into two broadly defined categories – sign systems and knowledge domains. Sign systems are those areas that deal with communication in its different forms – spoken and written language, drawing, mathematical notation etc. Knowledge domains are fields of knowledge that are used to structure and organise human understanding about the world – science, literature, history, geography etc.

In primary education there is an emphasis on three specific areas of learning: literacy, numeracy, and social skills. These take precedence over all others.

However, the foundational tool of all learning is language and, although there is an emphasis on the three areas above, no areas of the curriculum can be developed successfully without also developing children’s skills in speaking and listening.

This is why successful primary education ensures children get frequent and sustained opportunities to practice speaking and listening in structured and unstructured ways.

Much like my instructor giving me time to drive, children need opportunities to use and apply their developing language skills. Not all the time (is anyone suggesting that?), but frequently and sustained across the curriculum, since no ones learns how to use language by just sitting, listening and answering questions.

Some sign systems, like phonics, grammar, mathematical computation, are best taught using instructional methods. But not too much, for too long: there may be a temptation to do this but it will be a waste of time. The law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quick with young learners and after about fifteen minutes of direct instruction you’ll be talking to yourself.

The mantra when teaching new skills and knowledge through direct instruction is ‘little and often’. Followed by diverse opportunities for students to use and apply their new learning in meaningful and engaging ways (engaging because they are far more likely to remember what they doing and stay focused on the activity if it’s something they are enjoying).

Learning involves acquisition, application, and development. New skills, especially the sign systems, often take a considerable amount of time and effort. They are not learned easily or quickly, and many children find them difficult. For this reason it is important to explain to your class why they are learning these difficult skills and how they are useful in the real world.

Teaching strategies fall into three broad categories: transmission, discovery, and inquiry. None are effective at teaching the whole of the curriculum on their own.

Most teachers use all three in an effort to match learning to the best teaching method. Many teach grammar, phonics, and mathematical computation through transmission methods (including chanting, for times tables, spelling etc), while using discovery for using and applying, developing social skills and practising speaking and listening, and inquiry for more structured collaborative investigations.

We all recognise teaching and learning is a complex business. There are many diverse and often competing elements to take into account, including the interests and drives of thirty young minds, and bringing them all into successful balance is a constant struggle. There is no magic bullet, no single solution, no grand approach that will solve all our worries and send every student in our class on an upward curve of progress. So why limit our options? Use the best teaching method you find for teaching your students. And be flexible, change if need be, not all classes are the same, and a method that works with one group of students might not work well with another.

A note on using mantle of the expert

Teachers using mantle of the expert contextualise the curriculum (both knowledge domains and sign systems) using a fictional narrative or frame. They don’t include all the curriculum, only those areas that fit in coherently and only those areas best taught using the approach. Other areas of the curriculum are taught discreetly. It is a practical and mixed approach that focuses on learning and making curriculum study meaningful and uses all three teaching methods at different times – transmission, discovery, and inquiry.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/09/there-is-no-right-way-to-teach-everything/feed/1L.S. Vygotsky and Education – Luis C. Moll, 2014http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/l-s-vygotsky-and-education-luis-c-moll-2014/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/l-s-vygotsky-and-education-luis-c-moll-2014/#commentsSat, 30 Aug 2014 08:12:14 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1400If you have qualified as a teacher in the last ten years there is every chance Lev Vygotsky’s ideas on education played a significant part in your training. Born in Belarus in 1896, Vygotsky’s life was cut short in 1934 when he died from TB. Yet in the few years he worked as an educational psychologist, Vygotsky made significant discoveries and laid out a systematic theory for teaching and learning that for many represents the groundwork for modern day pedagogy.

His central idea is that human beings learn in social-cultural environments with the support and guidance of those who know more. Famously termed, the zone of proximal development, socio-cultural environments, such as classrooms, ideally operate as supportive arenas for developing young minds.

The zone of proximal development then, is a continuum between what a child can do independently, representing his or her actual level of development, and what the child can do with assistance from others, representing the proximal level of development. This places the teacher at the centre of the learning process, alongside the children in their class. Vygotsky’s ideas are not (as often portrayed) ‘child-centred’, rather they are community centred, where the teacher is neither led by the whims of their class nor delivering the curriculum like a series of parcels.

Vygotsky’s ideas represented a significant challenge to contemporary learning theory in America and the UK when they were first translated into English in the early 1980s. Unlike Piaget and other ‘progressives’, Vygotsky didn’t see human beings as exclusively natural learners, for him the social-cultural-historical dimensions of learning were just as important. He came to understand learning was not a matter of discovering the world as it is through experience, rather it is a social-construction made possible through interaction with people (especially teachers) who know and can do more. Vygotsky’s ideas place community at the centre of the learning process, where participants, both students and teachers, play an active and conscious role in bringing learning and development about in their social interactions.

Unlike Discovery Learning theory, where the teacher creates opportunities for students to find out things for themselves and then gets out of the way. Or Transmission Learning theories where the teacher stands at the front of the class to efficiently communicate knowledge to well-trained receivers. Vygotsky’s Social Constructivist theory sees teaching and learning as a processes of mediation by means of social/cultural tools, especially language. Learning, therefore, is something that is made within the culture of the group. Built on existing layers of knowledge and understanding with the help of someone who knows more. A bit like constructing a bridge across a river, brick by brick, starting at one end and finishing at the other. The teacher’s job, in this process, is to plan the activities and to supply the appropriate level of support (or scaffolding) needed for the project to succeed.

Like most theories from the worlds of psychology and cognitive science, Vygotsky’s ideas have been simplified and distorted on their way into the classroom. Under the Blair administration, the ZPD became the ‘personalised learning agenda’, turning teachers into whirling dervishes, planning at all hours to create individual learning ‘journeys’ for each one of their students. And, assessment for learning, became ‘individual layered targets’, turning the process of learning into a frantic, always moving, scramble for onward progression; something like Gromit, in the Wrong Trousers, throwing track down in front of the train as it rushes out of control around the house.

Not unsurprisingly, some exhausted and disenchanted teachers have started to blame Vygotsky as the father of these terrible initiatives and his reputation has taken a bit of a battering over the last few years. To my mind, this is unfortunate. Vygotsky cannot be held responsible for the target-setting mania of our current education system, anymore than Newton can be blamed for the Reliant Robin. The zone of proximal development and Vygotsky’s other ideas were meant as diagnostic theories – ways of explaining how people (especially children) learn in formal and informal social settings – they were not intended as heavy-handed planning and assessment tools for turning classrooms into mechanistic target factories.

If like me, you came across Vygotsky at University and have heard his name many times since but never really understood what the zone of proximal development meant, then this is the book for you. Written by Luis Moll as part of the Routledge ‘Key Ideas in Education’ series, it is an excellent introduction for busy teachers. Clear and concise, it gets to the heart of why Vygotsky is (and deserves to be) a major figure in modern day pedagogy.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/l-s-vygotsky-and-education-luis-c-moll-2014/feed/2Why telling the truth is better for learninghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/why-telling-the-truth-is-better-for-learning/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/why-telling-the-truth-is-better-for-learning/#commentsThu, 28 Aug 2014 16:54:08 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1386Last July the Daily Mail published a story entitled: Teacher apologises to parents after ‘alien egg’ project leaves children ‘in tears and too scared to go to school’

The by-line ran:

Problem solving project centred on a 3ft-high egg found in school grounds

Children were told the egg was safe, and asked to help investigate the ‘amazing discovery’

Many parents said their children were enjoying the project

But some complained younger pupils were in tears or having nightmares

Headteacher Jon Smith later apologised if children were ‘worried’ by stunt

At the end of the story, the Mail quoted Mr Smith’s letter to parents:

“We assure you that this afternoon we held an extra whole school assembly where we made it absolutely clear to everyone that the egg was of no danger to anyone, that it was safe to keep in school, and that we would therefore be able to observe it further tomorrow.

‘We apologise if that message did not come through sufficiently and, as planned, in the follow-up assembly in the morning we will place further emphasis on it being of absolutely no danger whatsoever.

‘During the course of today the children have produced an enormous amount of high quality work, in a variety of forms, related to the egg and it was great to see them so engaged. Such “discoveries” are quite common in primary schools across the country and are a very successful way of promoting problem solving, teamwork, group discussion and PSHE-related topics. This activity is part of our “No Problem” theme this term.’

_______________________________

With the new school year looming and teachers beginning to plan for the new term, I thought it is worth returning to this story and exploring some of the moral and pedagogical issues it throws up.

1. Was it unethical for the teachers to deceive their students about the egg? (Link to blog)

If you are someone who thinks lying to children is always unethical and the teachers were lying to their students when they pretended the egg was real, then the project was flawed from the beginning and should never have gone ahead.

‘Always’, however, is a bold claim and I’m sure it wouldn’t take us long to make a short list of exceptions.

For example, I remember lying to Finn about knowing the burglars were no longer in the school when we discovered a break in on a Saturday morning visit to my classroom. I justified the lie because Finn was frightened and I saw no need to tell him the truth and frighten him anymore.

My point is, there are always exceptions to this rule, and for this reason we should revise it. Either to:
– ‘Lying to children is unethical, most of the time’.
Or (better still):
– ‘We should tell children the truth as often as possible, unless we have an excellent reason not to.

So, did the teachers involved in the dinosaur project lie to their students?

I’d say, yes. The egg was a fake and the adults knew it was a fake. So, telling the children it was real was a lie. It was a benevolent lie, but a lie nonetheless.

Did it, however, constitute a valid exception?

Well… no. Not for me.

I can think of six reasons why we might lie to children.

They are in order of validity:

1. To keep them safe
2. To allay their fears
3. To protect them from uncomfortable or unpleasant ideas, events, and truths
4. To avoid telling them things you think they are not ready to hear about (for example, adult ‘matters’)
5. To entertain them, amuse them, or add some magic into their lives (Father Christmas, fairies etc.)
6. To invent engaging scenarios, such as simulations, (sometimes) for educational purposes. The dinosaur egg scenario fits this category.

If you think the egg project was a major distraction from the serious business of curriculum learning, and an ineffective teaching method, then you are likely to be critical.

The criticism rests on an apparent dichotomy between learning and fun. Fun activities, it is argued, distract students from concentrating on the real purpose of school – curriculum learning. So, while they are enjoying themselves (drawing dinosaurs, writing about palaeontologists, etc.) they are not thinking about what they are studying, only experiencing a sense of enjoyment. This is not what learning is about: learning is about concentrated, dedicated, hard work; the rest is a frivolous distraction.

I’ve written a longer answer to this criticism here, but, in short, I believe the dichotomy is a false one and there is no reason why people can’t do both – enjoy themselves and work hard. The problem is not with exciting activities, but with weak planning and a lack of challenge. Just as didactic teaching can suffer if the students get bored and lose focus, so imaginative teaching can suffer if the activities concentrate too much on having fun and not enough on learning.

It is possible the dinosaur egg project suffered in this way. It is not clear, from the reports, that the students understood the project was about learning. If true, it is a major weakness in its design.

3. Engaging the students’ imagination.

If we take the headteacher at his word – “[the children produced] an enormous amount of high quality work” – then we can hardly say they weren’t working hard enough.

So, ‘what’s the harm?’ you might ask. ‘If students are working hard and the school are getting good results, isn’t the lie justified?’

Well, no. Not for me. It’s not a valid enough reason. I’m completely in favour of generating exciting and meaningful learning experiences for students, ones that stimulate their imagination and create enjoyable, purposeful, activities for learning. But I don’t think it justifies the lying.

More to the point, I don’t think its necessary. Why not tell them it’s a fiction from the beginning? That way, you get all the excitement and engagement, without having to lie.

Let me explain…

Let’s go back to the first morning of the dinosaur project. We (the teachers) have been in early to plant the fake eggs in a corner of the school field and we’re talking to our classes about what’s going to happen next.

“I don’t know if any of you have heard, but the teachers have been busy all this week making giant eggs for a story and the story is going to start this morning in the middle of a jungle: a jungle on an island, where no human beings have ever stepped foot.

“To start the story we’re going outside onto the field, where the eggs are, not as ourselves, but as explorers. But before we go, I was wondering what else we might find on the island…”

Starting this way has several advantages.

First, no lying, the students know exactly what’s going on from the beginning: the teachers have made the eggs, so they not real, and it’s all part of a story.

Second, the students are invited into the story, not as themselves, but as explorers. This gives them more influence and authority inside the fiction. This is important because it creates opportunities to make choices and contribute to the direction of the work.

Third, it gives the students the opportunity to collaborate on inventing the island. The imaginary scenario is not a simulation, but something co-created by the teacher and the students working together.

Fourth, this means the students have to do more of the work, creating more opportunities for learning.

Fifth, the location of the story is not the school field, but an imaginary island. This makes the fiction much clearer to the students, even the young ones

Because the teachers have made the fiction explicit from the beginning there is no need for confusion or fear. Any lingering worries can be quickly allayed by the teacher reminding the students it is all made up, just part of a story.

Creating imaginary scenarios for learning is not the same as pretending Father Christmas is real. School and home are different environments and our students are other people’s children, not our own. I’m not suggesting teachers should disabuse young children of the existence of Father Christmas or fairies in the garden (that really would get the Daily Mail foaming at the mouth), I’m suggesting we remain agnostic on the matter and, if asked, duck the answer: “Oh, I don’t know, what do you believe?” Young children are entitled to their beliefs, even if they are untrue, and it’s not our place to deny them.

Making up things, and pretending they are true, is a different matter. There are very few advantages and a lot of drawbacks, as the staff of the dinosaur egg school discovered to their cost. In my experience it’s far better to be upfront from the beginning. Children are quite capable of suspending their disbelief and the advantages to teaching and learning are far greater.

Children, like most people, don’t like finding out they have been lied to and tend to react badly. I remember planning half a term’s work based on some giant holes that had suddenly opened up around Norwich, swallowing half the city. This scenario was based on real events, including a double-decker bus that was nearly eaten by a collapsing mine shaft. The children knew about this story, it had been on the news, and so when I told them about the holes opening up in the city, they believed it. For half-an-hour there was a terrific buzz of excitement and great energy as they set about planning to rescue trapped people. Suddenly though the atmosphere changed when Jamie Burrell asked, ‘Is this real?’ I knew straight away I was in trouble, ‘Um, no’, I admitted, ‘it’s just a story.’ ‘Oh,’ said Jamie, ‘so you lied to us.’

And that was it. The project (and all my planning) went down one of the holes. All the energy left the room and within an hour the whole thing was dead.

A lesson for me.

What I should have done, is tell them right from the beginning that it was a ‘what if’ story…

‘I was thinking about that bus that fell in the hole, and wondering, what if, the holes started opening up all over the city? Then, what if we were a rescue team given the job of rescuing all the trapped people. Do you think that might make an exciting story?’

That way, when Jamie asked: ‘Is this real?’ I could have answered, ‘No, you remember we discussed it? It’s a ‘what if’ story, like a disaster movie, and because we’re making it up we can decide what happens next.’

I reckon that would have been much better than lying.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/why-telling-the-truth-is-better-for-learning/feed/0Some planning tips for new teachers in Key Stage 1http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/some-planning-tips-for-new-teachers-in-key-stage-1/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/some-planning-tips-for-new-teachers-in-key-stage-1/#commentsMon, 25 Aug 2014 20:49:30 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=13841. Don’t panic! The curriculum for KS1 is fundamentally about reading, writing, maths, and lots of speaking and listening. There is a small amount of content in the foundation subjects – science, history, geography etc. – but not too much: so breath easy on coverage. For KS1 the curriculum is all about practicing the basic skills without turning school into a bore.

2. Pick a topic kids are interested in. A year with a class of bored infants can be a very long time. Here are some suggestions: castles, animals, dinosaurs, traditional stories and fairy-tales, sharks, space (especially aliens), caves, volcanoes, fire-fighters and rescue teams.

3. Pick a topic you’re interested in. The kids will soon realise if you’re going through the motions teaching a topic you’re not inspired by or know little about.

4. If you’re lumbered with a boring topic you have to teach, then find a way to make it interesting. ‘Rocks’ was always a dreaded one from the QCA schemes of work, but the actual content was tiny and so quite easy to turn into something exciting like, ‘A Mission to Mars’.

5. Use picture books if you’re stuck for ideas. There are some fantastic books for young children that make great lesson starters and stimulus for writing. Keep one or two up your sleeve. My current favourite is, “Don’t Read this Book!” A wonderful layered narrative told from multiple points of view.

7. Plan for learning over the whole year. Don’t be in too much of a hurry and don’t leave everything until the last minute. The programmes of study in the new curriculum are incremental and designed for student development year on year, so make sure the knowledge and skills you’re responsible for are practiced and consolidated. This takes time, preparation, and planning, so make sure you start early and give the students plenty of opportunities to develop.

8. Little and often. Reading, writing, and maths skills are developed through sustained, concentrated, practice over time. So practice them every day and don’t be afraid to use silence. On the other hand, don’t over do it. The law of diminishing returns kicks in early in KS1.

9. Don’t over plan. If you plan things in too much detail you are bound to regret it. Try planning activities (rather than coverage and development) for only a few days ahead and then fill in the details as you go along. This will keep your planning flexible and responsive to what’s happening in class and help you avoid planning activities you don’t end up using. Of course, don’t go too far the other way and find yourself under-prepared!

10. Listen to the children. The best resource we have in our classrooms is the children’s imagination, so listen to their ideas and pay attention to their interests and tacit knowledge. Of course they can’t do the planning for you and they’re not in charge, but if you can use their ideas to teach the same curriculum then I reckon it’s worth twice as much as using one of your own.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/some-planning-tips-for-new-teachers-in-key-stage-1/feed/3Silence is golden (sometimes)http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/silence-is-golden-sometimes/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/silence-is-golden-sometimes/#commentsFri, 22 Aug 2014 15:44:47 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1381If we need any more proof that ideology should play no part in directing pedagogy, it is in the matter of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ learning. What even is ‘passive’ learning anyway? If it means doing nothing, then it’s not learning. If it means not speaking or moving around, then it’s not passive. Listening is active participation, just not involving movement or sound. We do this every time we read a book, listen to the radio, or watch TV.

So let’s consign the idea of ‘passive learning’ to the dustbin.

And while we’re at it, let’s do the same to the notion that silent learning is just for traditionalists.

Few things get up my nose more than the idea that primary school kids can’t work in silence and don’t like doing it when they do. The truth is, they can, they do, and, more to the point, they should.

Does this mean they should do it all the time? Of course not. That would be equally absurd. What they should do is a stint every day for an amount of time appropriate to their age. As a rule of thumb, I would say 5 minutes a day in both reading and writing, starting in Year R, and building up, 5 minutes extra every year, until Yr 4. So in upper Key Stage 2 they’d be doing 30 minutes silent reading and writing every day. (To be honest 30 minutes silent writing is a bare minimum in KS2).

The reasons for this are three fold. First, concentrating on one thing is hard, especially if that thing is difficult. It takes effort and stamina to focus the mind and keep it focused. We can’t expect children to do it well without giving them the time and support they need to practice. So, the sooner they start and the more they do it, the better.

Second, both reading and writing require sustained practice over time in a place with minimum distractions. Even for experienced writers, writing in a noisy room with lots of distractions is hard. Imagine how much harder it is for someone who finds writing really difficult? For this reason the minimum amount of distractions is crucial.

Third, getting started at writing and reading takes time and can’t be rushed. Often it takes at least ten minutes to get started and another ten minutes to really get going. That means even in a session of thirty minutes there is only ten minutes optimum writing time. For this reason students often complain when it is time to stop and beg for more.

Try it yourself, try writing something you would be happy for someone else to read and evaluate, when you only have thirty minutes writing time. Now try to imagine doing that in a crowded classroom full of noise and distractions. It wouldn’t be easy.

Regular and extended periods of silent reading and writing are, therefore, vital for young children’s development. And we should not be afraid of organising silent sessions because of ideological arguments about ‘passive’ learning.

I could make the same argument for maths and other subjects when the learning requires it.

So far, so traditionalist.

Where I differ from our more authoritarian colleagues is on the matter of enforcement. For me, if you can’t explain to your students why a particular strategy for learning is the best one, then either you need to practice explaining things better or the strategy you’re recommending is not all it’s cracked up to be.

You might complain you don’t have the time or inclination to explain your thinking to your students and they should just get on with it. I think this is a mistake. It might save time in the short-term, but in the long run it carries with it the germs of its own failure.

By inclination, human beings tend to equate activities they are made to do, with things that are unpleasant, tiresome, and best avoided. Therefore, you can probably use your authority to force children to work silently (punishments and rewards work pretty well for this approach), but the lesson they are really learning is not the one you want them to.

For me, a better strategy, although more difficult and ambitious, is to spend time explaining why working in silence is the best approach. I’ve found children don’t need too much convincing; the argument is pretty obviously true. However, agreeing in principle is not the same as actually doing it, and some students really struggle at the beginning.

When this happens I find sympathy, reasoning, and enforcement is what’s needed. By enforcement I don’t mean shouting, sending people out of the room, or doling out stupid stickers, I mean explaining what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. For example, “Please remember this is a silent writing time, people are trying to concentrate and don’t want to be distracted. I know it can be hard, but we agreed no talking. If you need some help then ask, otherwise please get on with your work.”

Sometimes, of course, reasoning is not enough: “You seem to be having trouble concentrating today, Josh. Come and sit over here next to me, you might find it easier.”

Or, on a really bad day: “People! I’m going to ask you all to stop. Please put down your pencils. I’m sorry to stop those of you who are working and not talking, but this is not what we agreed. Remember we discussed this? What we’re after is total silence so that everyone can concentrate without being distracted. I don’t want to nag, but that’s what we agreed and I’ll get really grumpy if we don’t do it. Now, let’s have another go.”

My experience is this approach works in the long run. Of course it takes time and there are set backs, especially after the holidays, but gradually and incrementally children develop the required stamina and focus to make it work.

In my last class of Year 2’s I had a significant number of children, mostly boys, who didn’t like writing and found it difficult to work silently for even a few minutes. We had a discussion, where I explained the strategy of silent writing and why I thought it would work, we then drew up an action plan, agreeing to work in silence for twenty minutes a day in reading and writing, and included a list of consequences – a warning, followed by a second warning, then moving seats. With this in place we got started.

I’ll be honest, it was difficult to begin with and at times I had to get really quite ‘grumpy’. But over three or four weeks, practicing every day, and discussing our progress, things got gradually better. Until, by the end of the second month, the sessions of silent reading and writing had extended to twenty-five minutes.

For many of the children, including some of the malcontents, these quiet sessions became some of their favourite sessions of the day, as they testified at the leavers’ assembly. One of the things they liked most was rearranging the tables into lines, to minimise interference and distraction. By the summer term my role as enforcer had almost disappeared as the children began to police the sessions themselves, politely reminding miscreants of their responsibilities.

Of course, silent reading and writing is only one strategy I use. It’s the one I find works best for the kind of learning happening in those sessions. But it is not the only teaching strategy I have. At other times I use inquiry or discovery learning. Drama plays a significant role in my teaching, as well as art, history and the other curriculum subjects. I use an approach that largely integrates the curriculum, making connections and forging links. So that when the children write they write about subjects we have been studying across the curriculum.

As a teacher I resist being told what approaches I can and should use. I trust my professional judgement. Young children working in silence for extended periods of time might be construed as passive or traditionalist, I don’t care. Neither do I care if using drama or discovery is labelled as progressive. These terms are labels, nothing more. Different kinds of learning require different kinds of strategies, dialogue, experimentation, and play can be useful and effective, as can silent work and transmission teaching. They all have their place. It is our professional responsibility to find it.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/silence-is-golden-sometimes/feed/0Teaching as Story Telling, Kieran Eganhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/teaching-as-story-telling-kieran-egan/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/teaching-as-story-telling-kieran-egan/#commentsWed, 13 Aug 2014 12:56:13 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1373Visit any primary classroom and you will find a corner of the room dedicated to books and reading These are often lovely comfy spaces, scattered with soft cushions to sit on and displays to capture the children’s imagination. They reflect, despite the growing importance of technology in schools, how books still play a central role in the education of young people. This is widely accepted and understood. Teachers tell their students stories from the very first day they start school and children’s storybooks are better made and more engaging than they have ever been. Yet stories are an underused medium for learning. Pushed into the margins of the curriculum to stimulate art and drama activities, but forgotten or neglected when the study of more ‘serious’ subjects begins.

This is the claim made by Kieran Egan in his challenging and provocative book, Teaching as Story Telling.

First published in 1986, Teaching as Story Telling is widely read in North America, but largely unknown in the UK. It questions the use of the objectives-led planning and teaching model predominant in the current system – which views education as a production line delivering discreet units of information in tiny packages – and argues that we underestimate children’s capacity for learning, in particular the central role of imagination in making meaning of the curriculum. Technologized teaching, he says, is a clockwork orange, something that looks like the thing it wants to be, but misses the essential essence.

His main idea is that stories are a powerful medium for learning and we should start combining the elements which make them so effective into strategies for teaching and learning that are engaging and meaningful.

When planning, he argues, teachers should ask themselves the same question a newspaper editor asks a reporter: “what’s the story on this?” That is, how can we make this particular knowledge something people will understand and connect with? The problem with most educational experiences, Egan argues, is that the focus is too much on the dispassionate ‘cognitive’ aspects of learning and not enough on the emotional ‘affective’ dimensions. Good stories, with characters, tensions, and narrative events, have the effect of drawing us in and making meaning of complex ideas. They are more memorable, than disconnected facts taught in isolation.

An idea taken up by Daniel Willingham, who describes stories as “psychologically privileged… meaning they are treated differently in the memory than other types of material.” Which is quite a claim when you think about it. Stories, Willingham argues, not only expand the mind’s ability to make sense of information, they also make that information more memorable. Therefore, if we put knowledge, ideas, and values into stories then children are more likely to understand them and more likely to remember them later.

Not only this, but we don’t even need to teach them how to do it, since children come to school with this cognitive ability already built in. As Willingham says, “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories”. Which isn’t even a new idea, since, as E.D. Hirsch reminds us: “stories are the best vehicles for teaching young children – an idea that was ancient when Plato reasserted it in Republic.”

Egan’s argument then, is that we should acknowledge the psychological advantage of stories – to make meaning for children – and rethink the way we create learning opportunities in the classroom. We need to start treating imagination as a tool for thinking and cultivate a richer image of the child as an imaginative thinker, using stories, as Hirsch says, as ‘vehicles’ for teaching. Egan describes stories as “narrative units”, involving problems or conflicts that need resolving. Stories have an internal structure that holds them together and determines what should be included and excluded. Children can make meaning from these various elements and form a model of the story in their minds. Information, concepts, and different perspectives can be woven into the material of stories to create imaginative learning environments where children can explore the curriculum.

Egan makes a compelling case for why we should use stories to make the curriculum more accessible and meaningful to our students. But they are rarely used as vehicles for learning beyond KS1. This is, in my opinion, a missed opportunity.

This review was first published in Teach Primary Magazine and is re-published here with their kind permission.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/teaching-as-story-telling-kieran-egan/feed/0Play as a medium for learninghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/play-as-a-medium-for-learning/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/08/play-as-a-medium-for-learning/#commentsThu, 07 Aug 2014 17:10:58 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1371Some of the most astonishing photographs taken during the latest Israeli bombardment of Gaza were those of young children playing among the rubble and carnage left by the bombs.

It is almost as though the games they were playing were a shield against the horror and bloodshed that surrounded them. They had no power to stop the terror of the real world of adult conflict, so they were retreating to imaginary worlds where they were the ones who made the decisions – places of greater safety.

Play is, as far as we can tell, a near universal and innate human ability. And when children play they are using it as a medium of learning.

That is not, of course, the same as making a statement about the quality of the learning. Learning through play is not somehow sacred or privileged, but has limits the same as any other learning medium.

One of the confusions we make about play is how it is defined. For me, it falls into one of three categories:

1. Organised play or games, with established rules and codes of conduct: usually organised and run by adults. That is until the children develop the necessary skills and knowledge to run the games themselves.

2. Self-directed play: either one child playing alone or with other children. Play of this kind often involves an imaginary dimension. For example, two children playing chase pretend to be a zombie chasing Scooby-Doo.

3. Imaginary play for learning: This involves an adult, playing with a child, or children, but with a focus on curriculum learning. By curriculum I mean all aspects of the curriculum – social, emotion, and academic.

To evaluate the quality of the learning in each category we have to have a clear idea of what kind of learning we hoping to be developed.

Children aimlessly kicking a football about with an adult who makes no effort to develop their skills, are clearly learning very little.

Children running around in a play-ground playing Scooby-Doo are likely to be having fun and are probably learning some things about social interactions, mediation, and communication, but this learning is a by-product of their game, not its primary purpose.

The children in the class, however, who are learning with an adult, who is taking part in their play and giving it direction and purpose, are hopefully learning a lot. At least they are if the adult is doing their job.

Play as a medium for learning then, is not a simply a matter of letting kids do whatever like. It is organised and purposeful, with clear pedagogical aims.

One thing to stress is that play in the classroom, when directed towards learning, does not always have to have an adult directly involved. Adults often provide resources and set tasks that generate purposeful and focused play towards curriculum ends.

Further, it is not to say that the adults are the only ones doing the directing. Play is by nature collaborative and enjoyable. Once a child becomes bored of play, either because they do not feel they have a voice in how it is run or because it has become dull and boring, they will stop and (if they can) walk away.

Play, of the kind that is about learning, involves working together, sharing ideas, and being with other human beings. It requires communication, compromise, and understanding if it is to work effectively.

And it requires a repositioning of the adult as the one who makes all the decisions.

Of all the challenges facing using play as a medium for learning, this is the one that adults find the most difficult to reconcile.

For me, it is all about balance. Tip too far one-way and you lose control of the class, too tip far the other and the children lose interest.

Using imaginative play as a way of teaching the curriculum is not an easy option and there are many obstacles to doing it well. But, that does not mean it we shouldn’t try. Learning involves risk, if we are asking our students take risks and get things wrong, then we should be prepared to do the same.

If you are not convinced that play can be an effective medium for learning or you want conclusive empirical evidence it works before you are prepared to try, then this little blog is hardly likely to change your mind. But, if you are like me, and you think play is (as it seems to be) an innate and universal medium for human beings to make meaning of the world, and something children do even in the most terrible situations like Gaza, then why wouldn’t you try?

It is tempting to think of the education debate as a battlefield. Two sides locked in mortal combat, fighting a never-ending war of ideas. Both convinced beyond doubt they are on the side of the angels, while their enemies are at best, misled, at worst, hell-bent on destroying all that is good.

I exaggerate of course. Nevertheless, the dispute is real and bitter, and both sides are reluctant to concede an inch, let alone listen.

But, what does it matter, you might ask? Isn’t the war so old, the battles so repetitive, the intransigence on both sides so ingrained, that it has become an irrelevance, a sort of war of mice that rumbles on behind the skirting-board, occasionally heard, but easily ignored by those of us who just get on with the job of teaching children?

Maybe. But ideas matter and all of us are a product of the values and principles we hold. These are our theoretical models, the bedrock of our practice, and they influence everything we do. I guess we take them for granted most of the time and are unaware of the way they influence our thinking. Nevertheless their impact is real and we do well to be aware of them.

This is particularly true when we come across a new idea. The temptation is to match it with an old existing one. This saves us both time and effort.

But, if you find yourself doing this then be careful; its lazy (battlefield) thinking, it closes the mind, and stops it listening to alternative views. Demagogues are particularly keen on channelling people into making lazy associations. They use clichés to besmirch the views of those they oppose (‘Gradgrind education’and ‘Trendy teaching’ to name but two) in an attempt to shut down the debate and force people to follow their path, as if they offer the only right course.

While the authors of ‘Expansive Education’, Bill Lucas, Guy Claxton, and Ellen Spencer are very clearly positioning themselves on the progressive side of the education debate, it would be very easy (lazy thinking) to read ‘Expansive Education’ as representing just another reiteration of an old familiar idea.

Certainly ‘expansive education’ shares many of the same principles of progressivism – the importance of authentic tasks; collaborative learning; students learning from each other – but it goes beyond a simple child-centred view where learning happens predominantly through discovery, and attempts to offer a new model of teaching and learning that places inquiry and reflective thinking at the centre.

In fact, the authors are at pains to distance themselves from the past: “if this sounds like a charter for loosely structured progressive, student-centred education, nothing could be further from the truth.” Their approach, they maintain, is much more focused on developing dispositions to learning through an active process of study, feedback, and reflection. While discovery does seem to play a part in this process, so does direct instruction, and inquiry. Teachers, they argue, should think of themselves as ‘change agents’, changing students from where they are to what they can be.

While the authors acknowledge the ‘giants’ of the past: Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky, they are keen to put their ideas into the context of current thinking, drawing on the work of Dweck (Mindsets), Ericsson (10,000 hours), and Hattie (Visible Learning). As a consequence while some of their ideas do sound like old school progressivism, others are much more up to date: developing growth mindsets; using inquiry; and making learning visible.

Of course for some on the battlefield this will represent nothing more than window dressing, a repackaging of old stale ideas: a slap of lipstick on the pig. For the rest of us though I think it is worthy of consideration. There is much in this book to think about. The authors do a good job of encapsulating wide areas of current thinking on education and give a number of examples from around the world of interesting experiments going on in pedagogy and curriculum. While I’m not entirely convinced this all adds up to a movement as they claim, I do find much in their writing that encourages me to find out more.

For me, the term ‘expansive education’ doesn’t quite capture the complexity of ideas they are trying to convey. After all isn’t it the aim of all education to expand the mind, whatever our approach to teaching and learning? Nevertheless, I do find much that is interesting and challenging in this book. They are certainly offering a radically different view of education from the one that predominates in our current system.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/06/nrocks2014-presentation-introducing-mantle-of-the-expert/feed/1A Review of Mindset – Carol Dweckhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-review-of-mindset-carol-dweck/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-review-of-mindset-carol-dweck/#commentsWed, 28 May 2014 09:30:37 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1353This article was first published in Teach Primary Magazine and is republished here with their kind permission.

First published in 2006, Mindset has become one of the most influential books in modern day education. Drawing on her research from Stanford University and including many stories of high-achievers from the fields of art, sport, and education, Dweck argues, when it comes to our beliefs on successful learning, people fall into one of roughly two camps: those that believe in the primacy of innate talent and those that belief in the overriding importance of sustained practice. People from the first group she describes as having a ‘fixed-mindset’, those from the second a ‘growth-mindset’.

Fixed-mindset people are unwilling to take risks, often protective of their own image, and defensive about making mistakes. They are quick to make judgements about themselves and others, and take criticism badly. They believe talent and intelligence are things people are born with and are generally fixed and unchanging – if you are good at something then it is because your have an aptitude for it. There is not much point in trying to change things that can’t be changed, so don’t bother – They are impressed with those that achieve without apparent effort or application.

Growth-mindset people view mistakes as opportunities to learn. They welcome risk and are open to feedback, including constructive criticism. They don’t make judgements about themselves or others and believe everyone is in a process of change and development. They see talent as a starting point, not as a gift to be worshipped. They value hard work and application and don’t see intelligence as fixed and unchanging. Test scores and levels tell us only where people are and nothing about where they might go.

People with growth-mindsets, Dweck suggests, are more successful, more open to learning, and happier. They know failure can be painful, but it doesn’t have to define them. They see failure as a problem to be faced, dealt with and learned from: “you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. You can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.”

She concedes some people have more resources and opportunities than others – particularly those people with money – and these assets can have a huge influence over their chances of success. But, she maintains, for growth-mindset people, success is not measured by money or fame, but by the satisfaction of “doing something because the effort was worth while.” This is what it is to be a happy and effective human being, someone in control of their life, in control of their relationships with others, and focused on self-improvement.

This is why the idea of mindsets is so influential in the sphere of education. If children can be taught to develop a growth-mindset, in contrast to a fixed-mindset, then they can not only be more successful academically, but for the rest of their lives.

But there are problems. One is in the way the system is based on judging children every step of their way through education. Tests, levels, sets, and so on communicate to children that they are being judged, organized, and taught based on how clever they are. This has a profound effect on their own belief systems and sense of self, developing a tendency towards a fixed-mindset even from a very young age: “children from as young as five can believe their intelligence can be set now and forever, by a test or by an expert and by being set in an ability group.” By the time they reach high school: “many adolescents mobilise their resources, not for learning, but to protect their egos. They view the adults as saying: ‘Now we will measure you and see what you’ve got.’ And they are answering: ‘No you won’t”.

This is further exacerbated by our tendency to label and set children apart as either, ‘Special Needs’ or ‘Gifted and Talented’. At both ends of this spectrum children come to believe their intelligence and talents are fixed, and their futures predestined, creating and reinforcing the fixed-mindset, with all its problems and limitations.

Dweck concludes that we need to teach our children that what is important is their potential: not were they are now, but where they might get to with hard work, support, and dedication. A child might have an aptitude for a subject, sport, or art, but they will still need to work hard to improve. They might be struggling now to grasp something new or develop something different, but one day they will get there.

“Most often when kids are behind they’re given dumbed down material on the assumption they can’t handle more, but the results are depressing. Students who repeat the whole grade don’t learn anymore than they knew before.” Dweck maintains we must not assume children are dumb because they can’t do something (yet) and we shouldn’t dumb down the curriculum to make it easier for them. On the contrary, we must challenge them, expand their horizons, and provide them with a curriculum that is rich in content and possibilities. Of course simply raising standards, without giving students the means of reaching them, is a recipe for disaster. It just pushes the poorly prepared or poorly motivated students into failure and out of school. But, with support, care, and understanding we can set high standards and help children to reach them.

Mindset is a convincing and accessible book with a powerful central message for all in education: “we must teach our students to love learning and to learn and think for themselves.” I would class it as an essential read.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-review-of-mindset-carol-dweck/feed/2Using Play as a Medium for Learninghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/using-play-as-a-medium-for-learning/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/using-play-as-a-medium-for-learning/#commentsFri, 16 May 2014 19:11:33 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1345This article was written for the Guardian Teacher Network and will appear there soon in a shorter version.

The use of play for developing children’s learning is a well-established feature of most early years settings. Visit a nursery, a reception, or many Year One classrooms and you will find ample opportunities for children to play, either alongside other children, with adults, or by themselves. Role-play corners are a common feature, and games, and construction toys are usually well resourced.

Most adults working in Early Years settings share the professional opinion, arrived at through study and experience, that play is a key pedagogical medium for learning. As a result they are careful to provide their students with plenty of opportunities to explore the curriculum through collaborative and exploratory play.

Unfortunately, as children move through school these opportunities begin to dry up. The pressures on teaching the formal aspects of the curriculum begin to take over and play, in its various forms, is pushed progressively further into the margins. Resources, spaces, and activities that create opportunities for learning through play decline until they almost disappear by the time children reach the top end of Key Stage 2.

In the early years, play is seen as something children do naturally as part of the way they find out about the world: discovering it through experience and experimentation. The best classrooms, it is argued, give children the time, space, and resources they need to find out things for themselves.

However, as they grow older attitudes to learning change and the focus shifts from discovery to academic study. As a consequence, play is marginalised and increasingly becomes something that happens outside the classroom on the school playing fields, organised and controlled by adults, and isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Gradually play inside the classroom is seen as something of a distraction: messy and unstructured, without direction or purpose.

This diminishing role of play as a medium for learning does not happen in every school, but where it does, it results in decreasing opportunities for teachers to plan effective lessons and for students to study in diverse and meaningful ways. Through play, using inquiry and drama strategies, students, can work in collaboration with their teachers to co-create imagined worlds and scenarios. These imaginary contexts can be used to create meaningful and exciting opportunities for students to study, apply, and expand their curriculum knowledge and understanding. Imagined (playful) contexts have the advantage of being safe and ‘penalty-free’, without the kinds of repercussions that exist in the real-world if things go wrong. They are like laboratories for learning.

The following list of activities is focused on using play as a medium for learning through the application of drama and inquiry. Each activity teaches a particular aspect of learning and links to a planning unit on the imaginative-inquiry website [ref.www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk]. This website is a resource of free planning written by teachers for others teachers to trial, adapt, and use in their own classrooms.

1. Play for meaning-making: exploring ideas, looking at events, attitudes, and decisions from the point of view of others.
Activity: The Iceni people of the Settlement are faced with a dilemma: hide their Queen (Boudicca) or hand her over to the Roman army [Ref http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/11/the-roman-box/].

2. Play for practicing, rehearsing, and evaluating possible alternatives and choices:
Activity: The Titanic is beginning to sink: the captain knows there are not enough lifeboats for everyone on-board. What is he going to do? His officers wait for their orders. [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/11/titanic/]

3. Play for dealing with conflict, making difficult decisions, coping with threats, and taking opportunities:
Activity: A team of landscape gardeners are given the job of building a memorial garden to remember a giant who was once selfish, but died a reformed character. Not everyone in the local community is happy. [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/11/the-selfish-giant/]

4. Play for practicing the use of authority, power, and responsibility:
Activity: We have captured a wolf, who has been threatening three little pigs. He is in a cage in the basement of our office. We can see him on our CCTV. What should we do with him? He looks bedraggled and unhappy. We wonder if he has a family to feed? [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/11/fairy-tale-problem-solvers/]

5. Play for researching and applying knowledge:
Activity: An archaeology team are about to open an ancient Roman security box buried for two thousand years. What will they find inside? Students use classroom resources, topic-books, websites, and pre-prepared information sheets to create the contents of the box. [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/11/the-roman-box/]

6. Play for investigating and exploring ideas, processes, concepts, and phenomena:
Activity: The students are building a model of an animal park in the classroom: they are given various constraints and problems they will need to resolve in order for the park to work effectively. [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/11/animal-park/]

7. Play for building ‘ethical selves’ – opportunities for students to imagine what they would do in certain circumstances, what things would they consider, what risks would they take, and what values do they hold:
Activity: A climber is trapped high up on a mountain – she has a broken leg and the weather is getting progressively worse – the mountain rescue team (represented by the students) consider what is an acceptable level of risk. [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/12/mountain-rescue/]

8. Play for building community, developing social bonds, and civic responsibility:
Activity: Settlers arrive in a new land. They search for a place to build a community. They discuss the best options geographically. They decide on a set of rules, and how to enforce them. They are faced with many challenges – famine, storms, invaders, wild-animals, illness and disease. They meet these challenges together. [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/12/anglo-saxons/]

9. Play for developing cognitive-tools – imagination, critical-thinking, thinking creatively, problem-solving:
Activity: A team of explorers parachute onto an unexplored island. They spend their first night on the beach sleeping in tents. They are awoken in the middle of the night by strange and terrifying noises coming from the jungle. What should they do in the morning? [http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/11/dinosaur-island/]

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/using-play-as-a-medium-for-learning/feed/1A Nagging Problem with Robert Peal’s Progressively Worsehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-nagging-problem-with-robert-peals-progressively-worse/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-nagging-problem-with-robert-peals-progressively-worse/#commentsFri, 09 May 2014 18:43:49 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1338This blog is not intended as a review of Robert Peal’s book, Progressively Worse:The Burden of Bad Ideas in British Schools, it is merely an observation – a sort of inquiry if you like – of something I noticed while I was reading it last week. I’ve had a number of conversations since, one of them including Mr. Peal, and the observation won’t got away. I’ve tried ignoring it, but it seems quite persistent. So here it is…

When I started studying history at university in the 1980’s the first book we were asked to read was E.H. Carr’s, ‘What is History?’ I don’t know if undergraduates still read this book, but back then it was considered a seminal work. Carr, as the title suggests, was interested in exploring the relationship between the stuff of history – events, people, and trends – and the job of the historian to make sense of it all and to communicate that understanding to others. History, he argued, is open to interpretation:

“The re-constitution of the past in the historian’s mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not in itself an empirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital of facts. On the contrary, the process of reconstitution governs the selection and interpretation of the facts: this, indeed, is what makes them historical facts… the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder… when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.” [p.16]

He follows this maxim with a word of advice, “When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog.” [p.18]

I don’t think even those as deaf as post (ideologically speaking) could fail to hear the buzzing in Peal’s writing. Here is a sample: “There are currently two education systems in Britain. One is respected and replicated the world over; the other is a persistent source of national embarrassment. They are the independent sector and the state maintained sector.” [p.262] As buzzing goes, this is as loud as it gets. But, I’ve no problem with this, Peal is entitled to his views and, although I like my historians to be a little less bombastic, a strongly expressed opinion is more welcome than pretending you have no opinion at all.

Peal’s tone is not what is bothering me. What’s bothering me, and won’t go away, is the way (on at least one occasion) he seems to ‘bend’ the facts to suit his narrative. For historians this is a real problem. Not because its hard to do, but because its easy. As Carr observes: “By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants… facts are like fish swimming about in a vast ocean; and what the historian catches will depend mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in.” [p.18]

It is, therefore, the historian’s duty to be careful about the way he uses his evidence. If he only chooses those facts that serve his argument, then he is in danger of loosing the trust of the reader. It is a matter of credibility.

As Carr says: “The duty of the historian to respect his facts is not exhausted by the obligation to see that his facts are accurate. He must seek to bring into the picture all known or knowable facts relevant, in one sense or another, to the theme on which he is engaged and to the interpretation proposed.” [p.22] This is like a covenant between the reader and the historian. The reader does not have the time to do all the reading around the subject, so he has to trust that the historian is not being unduly selective. Of course, the historian can’t include everything, that would be impossible, but he must not deceive the reader by missing out important information or foregrounding facts that support his argument, while passing over those that don’t.

Which brings us back to my niggling observation. Since reading Carr, I have become particularly distrustful of historians and commentators who try to tell me how to think. This is not at all a negative disposition, I try to remain open to new ideas and interpretations, but it is cautious. As a consequence, I am particularly wary of anything that sounds like an exaggerated truth.

With this in mind I came across the following passage in Peal’s book:

“According to a survey conducted by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate on behalf of the Plowden Report, around 21 per cent of schools were already rated as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ at exhibiting the features recommended by the committee. A further 47 percent were rated as ‘average’.[Plowden, vol.2 p.225] These desired features were divided into five categories: ‘provision for individual rates of progress’; ‘opportunities for creative work’; readiness to reconsider the content of the curriculum’; ‘awareness of the unity of knowledge’; and rather unbelievably ‘permissive discipline’.” [Peal p. 29]

It was the phrase, ‘permissive discipline’ that sprung out. Already forewarned by David Didau in his review, I was on the look out for it. It is such a strange term (isn’t it an oxymoron?) and I was interested to see how it would appear in Peal’s book.

Peal really makes a lot of the Plowden report: “The Plowden Report represents a high point in British society’s faith in the innate goodness of the child. With scant regard for evidence, it codified the romantic liberalism of the 1960s into a profoundly impactful document.” [Peal p.30] With this in mind, it would be fair to assume the quote he chose from the report must represent a central tenet of the authors. If not, why would Peal include it?

At this point it worth remembering the Plowden Report was published in 1967 in two volumes: Volume 1: The Report (555 pages) contained the report itself, consisting of 32 chapters, notes of reservation, three annexes, a glossary and an index. And Volume 2: Research and Surveys (633 pages), which contained the research and surveys that underpinned the report.

Although Peal is right to say the sales of the report were remarkable, it is, however, much more difficult to say how many people actually read it. And, of those that did, how many of them looked at the research and surveys in Vol.2. I certainly didn’t when I read it, which might explain why I had trouble recalling the phrase, ‘permissive discipline’ when I came across it in Peal’s book.

Fortunately, the whole of the Plowden Report is available on the Education in England website, which makes it very easy to search the document and find out where it turns up. After a bit of a search I found it on page 225 of the second volume. This is 780 pages into the report, in an annex: hardly central to report.

Anyway, what does ‘permissive discipline’ even mean? I’ve never come across it before. It’s a very strange term. Perhaps if we take a look at what Plowden says about discipline in the main report we’ll get a better idea of what she meant. The following quotes are all from Vol.1:

“We believe that the atmosphere in a school run on these lines is healthier than one in which discipline is authoritarian, and can foster self-discipline, a sense of responsibility for others in the community, and honesty in action and in thought.” [p.267]

“It is clear that to change a school run on traditional lines to one run on free lines requires faith and courage. The fact that a substantial number of schools have made the change is evidence that these qualities have not been wanting. They are certainly the first requirements in a reforming head, but they are not the only ones. It is not a question of saying ‘freedom is in, discipline is out’, an attitude which could lead to instant disaster.” [p.268]

“Time wasting occupations and exercises ‘to keep the children quiet while the teacher is busy, or marking the registers’ are fatal to good discipline and to good learning and there is no place for them, or need for them, in the kind of school we are discussing.” [p.268]

“Many older teachers brought up on authoritarian precepts may feel hostile or contemptuous when they are told of ‘free discipline’ and, even if sympathetic to the idea, may feel afraid of trying it. The thought of the possible chaos is too daunting. Some may genuinely doubt whether, even if it comes off, it is good for the children. They fear that the school would be too unlike the world outside where people have to struggle, learn to take orders and face uncongenial and uninteresting tasks. We sympathise with these fears and anxieties, but the last one at least is quite unfounded. We believe that the modern, relaxed, friendly approach is a much better preparation for life in contemporary society than the old authoritarian one.” [p.269]

And so on. There are 27 references to ‘discipline’ in Vol.1, most of them are like these. They are certainly progressive for 1967, but hardly ‘permissive’. So what does the term mean and why does it crop up in an HMI survey? Perhaps this next quote from Plowden will make things clearer:

“In a single class there may be children who are regularly and perhaps brutally thrashed at home, children who are taught implicitly or explicitly that all authority is an enemy and children who have never known any consistent discipline or control, let alone warm affection and interest.” [p. 269]

Note the line, “regularly and perhaps brutally thrashed at home”. We have to remember beating children in 1960s was still a regular form of discipline, even in schools. Is it possible Plowden was not arguing for the kind of ‘permissive discipline’ we imagine, but just for a change from the kind of authoritarian discipline that was still dealt out routinely to misbehaving children? I think this passage on punishment helps:

“Punishment

We have made it clear that the kind of school that we should like to see is one in which the delights as well as the rigours and demands of learning are built into the whole life of the place, so that there is little or no need for the stimulus of marks and class places and rewards, or for the sanctions of punishment in the cruder sense. Such schools, as we have said, are not visions of the future. There are many of them. Nevertheless, many teachers will feel that punishment is sometimes necessary and that the right to give it when it is judged to be necessary ought not to be withheld. Few indeed will now consider it in any way positively ‘good for children’ to be punished, and few will regard punishment as a cure either for deep seated evils, such as persistent cruelty, or for laziness, inattention and poor work. Punishment will be defended simply as a means to order. A single unruly member cannot be allowed to upset the whole of a class. The boy who ‘tries it on’ just to see how much the teacher will take, must discover quite soon that he will not take much. The child who persistently ignores rules of safety, for example, when crossing the road, must be sharply reminded of them. This we accept and we think that the decision whether to punish or not must be left to the individual teacher acting within the policy of the school. It is unwise to try to lay down precise rules which would confine individual professional judgement, but the excessive use of punishment of any kind should be regarded as an acknowledgement of someone’s failure.

What kind of punishment should be given is more open to doubt. We have little hesitation in saying that punishment ought not to humiliate a child, though it sometimes ought to humble him. But children differ. Something that will bitterly humiliate one child may be accepted with cheerful indifference by another. Sarcasm is a weapon that should never be employed. A punishment must be understood by the child and be seen to be just and to this extent accepted by him; the most difficult children may be, at least temporarily, beyond this kind of understanding and be afflicted with a sense of injustice in spite of every attempt to remove it. The conclusion seems to be that in the matter of how to punish as well as in that of whether to punish, the judgement of the teacher must be respected, although in the most difficult cases expert advice on problems of behaviour should be sought from school doctors and child guidance clinics. We do not feel justified in leaving the argument there. Corporal punishment appears to us to be in a special category and to need special consideration.

We have considered the opinions of the teaching profession and of HM Inspectors and have studied the regulations of local education authorities. We have also considered the views of psychologists, a sample of parental opinion and practice in other countries.

From the evidence available to us the following conclusions can be drawn:

(a) The overwhelming majority (between 80 per cent and 90 per cent) of the teaching profession are against the abolition of corporal punishment, though few support it except as a final sanction. (1, 2, 3, 4)

(b) Public opinion appears to be in favour of its retention and a considerable majority of parents agree to its occasional use.

(c) Only one local education authority forbids its use, but there is great diversity in regulations, some of which have not been revised for 20 to 30 years. To some extent local authority regulations reflect public opinion and the lack of any pressure for change; the infrequent revision of regulations may also be explained by a decline in corporal punishment (5).

(d) While there are few primary schools in which corporal punishment is never used, there are a large number in which it is used only rarely and its use is on the decrease. Infants and girls seldom receive it. (6)

(e) The associations of psychologists consulted by the Council agree that the advantages of corporal punishment are outweighed by its disadvantages. (7, 8)

The present legal position is that a teacher, who stands in loco parentis to a school child, is held to be justified in using a reasonable amount of force by way of correction. Magistrates can and do convict when they judge that an unreasonable amount of force has been used. Although it would be technically possible to make it a legal offence for a teacher to inflict any degree of corporal punishment on a child in school, this would present difficulties in practice. It would in particular make a teacher vulnerable to malicious prosecution. Moreover, it could be asked whether the same sanction should not apply to parents as well as teachers. In Denmark it has been possible to abolish corporal punishment in both school and home because public opinion was strongly behind the measure.

It has been almost universally outlawed in other western countries. (9) It can be associated with psychological perversion affecting both beater and beaten and it is ineffective in precisely those cases in which its use is most hotly defended. We think the time has come to drop it. After full consideration, we recommend that the infliction of physical pain as a recognised method of punishment in primary schools should be forbidden.

The most convenient method of carrying out our recommendations in the case of maintained schools seems to be an amendment of the Schools Regulations to provide that the infliction of physical pain as a method of punishment should not be allowed. No comparable sanction is available for independent schools generally and to prohibit corporal punishment in them would involve an amendment of the law. We believe that the law should be amended so as to give power to the Secretary of State to deny registration to any independent school in which the infliction of physical pain is a recognised form of punishment. In the meantime we recommend that no independent school in which this practice obtains should be granted recognition as efficient and we urge the professional associations of the independent schools to do everything in their power to ensure that it is discontinued in non-recognised schools. We hope that the schools themselves will take steps to abandon the practice entirely.

Our recommendations are likely to meet with some opposition. We may be accused of encouraging softness and of indulging the evil doer. The majority of teachers sincerely believe that corporal punishment may be necessary as a constraint. Indeed, a lack of corporal punishment in school will often contrast sharply with what happens in the child’s home. We believe, however, that the primary schools, as in so much else, should lead public opinion, rather than follow it. Often corporal punishment is the result of school conditions trying the patience of both teachers and pupils. Smaller classes and the presence of teachers’ aides (see Chapter 24) in all schools, particularly in the educational priority areas, may help those schools whose conditions are such that corporal punishment seems difficult to avoid. Teachers need to give time and individual attention to children who get into trouble; persuasion is a time-consuming business and cannot easily take place if a class is too large. On theoretical grounds alone, we believe that the kind of relationship which ought to exist between teacher and child cannot be built up in an atmosphere in which the infliction of physical pain is regarded as a normal sanction. The psychological evidence which we sought also supports this view. Our Report makes it clear at many points that we believe in discipline. But it can only come from a relationship between teacher and child in which there is mutual respect and affection. There is nothing soft or flabby about this relationship. It is impaired by disorder, untidiness, boredom and slackness and only flourishes in an atmosphere of order and purposefulness. To achieve the right balance between encouragement and restraint, between permissiveness and direction, between reward and admonition, between withdrawal and intervention, is the teacher’s art. It is with this art that much of this report is concerned and the art is not simply an amalgam or sum total of skills, knowledge, methods and aids, but rather a combination of these with judgement, discrimination, sensitivity, sympathy, perception and imagination, all of which are involved in the exercise of discipline and the education of children.

Recommendations

(i) Decisions on punishment should generally be left to the professional judgement of the individual teacher acting within the policy of the school.

(ii) The infliction of physical pain as a method of punishment in primary schools should be forbidden. Schools Regulations, which apply only to maintained schools, should be amended accordingly.

(iii) The Secretary of State should be given power to deny registration to any independent school in which the infliction of physical pain is a recognised method of punishment. Until such time as a change in the law can be made, no independent school in which this practice obtains should be recognised as efficient, and the professional associations of the independent schools should endeavour to ensure its discontinuance in non-recognised schools.” [Ref. Vol.1 pps.269-272]

Sorry for the length of the quote, but I think it is justified if we are to understand the context of the report and the fine line Plowden and the other authors where walking when they tackled the subject of discipline and punishment in schools at the time. It is easy now to forget what schools were like in the past, I went to a wonderful village primary in the early 70s that used the new progressive methods recommended by Plowden. Learning was exciting, fun, and challenging. There was no problem with discipline. I learnt a lot and developed a life-long love of learning. Following this I went to a traditionally run secondary modern, where fear and corporal punishment were a daily occurrence. Half the students in my final year left before Easter without taking a single exam. I hated that school and still do. I learnt nothing, except how not to be as an adult. This doesn’t mean progressive education was the answer. Mistakes were made and some progressive schools were terrible. Plowden warned them! But neither does it mean all the problems of our current system can be blamed on the progressives. This over-states the argument.

So, we return to Peal’s use of the term ‘permissive discipline’. While it is true the term does appear in the report, tucked away on page 225 of Vol.2, the question is, does it represent a genuine interpretation of the report’s recommendations or is Peal guilty of cherry-picking? Furthermore, if it does, then does this undermine Peal’s argument and his credibility?

I’ll leave you to make up your own minds.

Carr, I think, would have no trouble deciding: “The duty of the historian to respect his facts is not exhausted by the obligation to see that his facts are accurate. He must seek to bring into the picture all known or knowable facts relevant, in one sense or another, to the theme on which he is engaged and to the interpretation proposed.” [Carr p.22]

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-nagging-problem-with-robert-peals-progressively-worse/feed/4A short blog on behaviour, challenge, and expectationshttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-short-blog-on-behaviour-challenge-and-expectations/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-short-blog-on-behaviour-challenge-and-expectations/#commentsThu, 01 May 2014 18:39:00 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1332I’ve been working in a classroom recently.

A classroom where:

the children come in without having to line up…

choose who they sit next to and who they work with…

decide when they have completed a task…

and which one to do next…

don’t ask to go to the toilet…

or to have a drink if they are thirsty…

or a piece of fruit if they are hungry.

A classroom where:

the children work outside when they need to…

alone or in groups…

alongside and with adults…

in an environment that is notably calm, respectful, and collaborative…

where mis-behaviour is considered an opportunity for learning…

not for punishing…

where adults don’t shout…

or give detentions…

or have seating plans.

A classroom where:

learning is what everyone is about…

together…

alongside…

and with each other…

whatever their age,

knowledge…

or experience.

The classroom is in a nursery.

My questions are these:
Why is it the children in our schools have less freedom as they grow older?
Why are they trusted less and punished more?
Why do the levels of challenge and expectation fall the further they progress through the system?

Is it them or is it us?

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/05/a-short-blog-on-behaviour-challenge-and-expectations/feed/2A Glossary of Questionshttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/a-glossary-of-questions/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/a-glossary-of-questions/#commentsSun, 27 Apr 2014 19:10:58 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1319Knowing the right question to ask at the right time, one that generates thinking, compels dialogue, and promotes understanding, is a significant part of the art of great teaching. For this reason there are many books on the subject and many teachers have written excellent blogs sharing their thoughts.

My favourite book is ‘Asking Better Questions’ by Norah Morgan & Juliana Saxton. I’ve read it many times and whenever I return I always discover new insights and develop a better understanding. It is a treasure trove of wisdom and practical suggestions. It is still available on the Internet and I would heartily recommend buying a copy.

This blog constitutes just six pages from chapter 7. It is part of a glossary of questions complied by Morgan and Saxton designed to be used as a thinking tool for teachers. I’ve used the headings from the glossary, but changed the examples to ones from the imaginative-inquiry planning unit, ‘The Roman Box’. I hope you find it useful.

A Glossary of Questions

Please note there is no hierarchy to the order of the questions.

1. ‘Higher-order’ questions: taken from the last three categories of Bloom’s taxonomy – analysis, synthesis, or evaluation, for example:

Analysis: How did the Roman invasions affect the indigenous culture of Britain?

Synthesis: How can we communicate the effects of the Roman invasions (both positive and negative) to the visitors of the museum?

Evaluation: Can we say, on balance, the Roman invasions played a positive role in the history of the British Isles?

Comprehension: How did Roman attitudes to women and their treatment of Boudicca and her daughters contribute to the causes of the revolt?

Application: In what ways do the Iceni revolts (and their defeat) mirror modern responses and attitudes to invasion?

3. Closed questions are either:

(a) ones that ask for short, right answers: In what year did the second Roman invasion occur?

(b) or ones that my be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and recognised by use of their interrogative verb/noun structure: ‘is it?’, ‘have you?’, ‘will you?’, ‘shall we?’, for example: Will you choose to side with the Romans or the Iceni when it is time for the choice to be made?

Note: closed questions are very useful for testing recall, focusing attention, obtaining information, and for moving things on quickly. They can also be useful for helping reluctant students into talk because they do not ask them to put anything of themselves into the answer.

4. Open questions suggest the teacher does not have a particular answer in mind but is inviting students to consider and suggest possibilities: I wonder if things would have turned out differently if the Iceni had chosen a male leader?

5. Overt and covert questions are designed to elicit feeling responses:

Overt questions are direct and can sometimes be interpreted as threatening; they generally produce short answers: Were you afraid when you faced the Roman legions?

Covert questions are indirect and invite elaboration; sometimes they masquerade as a statement: I suppose the Iceni understood they had more to lose than just a Queen.

6. Branching questions give students a choice between alternatives: Should we just watch and wait, or is now the time to act?

7. Confrontation questions or ‘tough’ questions are ones that challenge students’ reasoning – pointing out inconsistencies or the validity of their thinking: What was the point of all this suffering and death if we are just going to give in to the Romans now?

8. Key questions or critical questions are ones that open up the issue: Why should we put our people, our families, and our community at risk when we have already lost? It was her recklessness that got us here.

9. Deductive questions pose a statement and then ask a question that requires evidence: The Iceni revolt was an inevitable failure from the start. What made it so?

10. Inductive questions require the answer to include a number of examples: What could the Iceni have done differently to avoid defeat?

Note: Deductive questions confine the area of inquiry. They are reductive, convergent, and close down discussion. Inductive questions widen the process of inquiry. They are expansive, divergent, and open up discussion. Deductive and inductive thinking are complementary parts of a cognitive process. It is, therefore, important to know which you are using and why.

11. Heuristic or creative questions are ones that guide the students into discovering the answers for themselves, using all their resources of knowledge, experience, and imagination: We know what the Romans are capable of and we know how important our culture is to our community, what are we to do?

12. Educative or productive questions are ones that help student learning, leading them to new facts, new perspectives, and new ideas: What do we hold true and value above all else, what would we defend until the last?

13. Divergent questions invite multiple responses from a large number of students and encourage both concrete and abstract thinking: In what ways would building our settlement near a river be a good idea?

14. Factual questions require students to give specific information: What is the name of the Roman Governor (at the time of the Boudicca revolt)?

15. Recall questions ask students to draw on their banks of knowledge and/or experience. Please remind me, what was on the Roman proclamation?

16. Research questions invite students to research a subject and often (but not always) design the procedure for research: What are we likely to find when we open this box? Please use the topic books provided they include artefacts of the kind we are likely to find.

17. Social questions are used as part of classroom management to pull the group together: Aren’t we straying from the point?

18. Rhetorical questions are designed to affect the emotions and do not expect an answer: Who amongst us is without guilt?

19. ‘Thinker’ questions or ‘ponder’ questions are similar to rhetorical ones, they are designed to generate thought and are usually used at the end of a session: I wonder how long it was before people forgot this story?

20. Reflective questions ask the students to think back over their learning, but do not require an immediate answer. The teacher will often need to wait, give the students time to think and the opportunity to talk and share their thoughts: I wonder if we had our time again, would we do things differently? Do you remember when…? I wonder if we ever really had a choice?

21. Opening questions are designed to start up a discussion: Can you remember what you were doing when the Romans first arrived?

22. Following questions reflect on what a student(s) has just said:

Student (Iceni): Everyone who steals should be banished, no exceptions.

Teacher (Iceni): No exceptions? Even children?

The intention here is the implied question: ‘Are you saying…?’

23. Synopsis questions designed to help students crystallise their thinking up to this point: Where did we get to yesterday?

24. Clarifying questions invite students to elaborate: Can you be more specific? What did you mean exactly? Could you say some more?

25. Evaluating questions invite students to look at their work in a critical fashion: In what ways could you improve this piece of work do you think? How close have you got to what you wanted to say? Is there anything you think needs changing?

26. Leading questions strongly imply an answer: Do you think he might have stolen the eggs because he was hungry?

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/a-glossary-of-questions/feed/1My Top Ten Books on Education (this week)http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/my-top-ten-books-on-education-this-week/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/my-top-ten-books-on-education-this-week/#commentsMon, 21 Apr 2014 19:00:29 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1316After a brief Twitter conversation, Phil Stock @joeybagstock suggested we name our Top Ten favourite books on education. Here are mine. They are not, let me stress, a list I expect everyone to agree with. Neither do they represent a definitive Top Ten, the best books on education ever written, or the most influential, seminal or whatever. They are just my current favourites and I’m very likely to change my mind tomorrow.

4. The Drama of History, John Fines & Ray Verrier [1974] – Long out of print, this is a treasure of a book. John Fines was one of the most brilliant teachers of a generation who took risks, experimented with pedagogy, and discovered some amazing applications. Now much forgotten and lost.

5. Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn [2000] – Alfie Kohn has carved out a career in recent years as the arch-enemy of the American School system. He’s a radical progressive and very unpopular in some quarters as a consequence. This, however, is his first book and its stunning. Meticulously well-researched and referenced, it is a damning attack on pop-behaviourism and its influence on schools and schooling. A brilliant and challenging read.

6. Teaching Drama: A Mind of Many Wonders, Norah Morgan & Julianna Saxton [1989] – Although this is a book written by Morgan and Saxton its really the work of Dorothy Heathcote, who they followed around for two years at the hight of her powers in the 1980’s. It is a wonderful book, the most accessible on Heathcote’s work, and full of practical ideas and strategies for using drama as a pedagogy. It should be on every student teacher’s reading list in my opinion.

10. Mindset, Carol Dweck [2012] – Although I think there are much better books on education that haven’t made my list. Dweck’s book is very influential and I find myself thinking about it all the time. The term ‘mindset’ is not perfect, but it does a lot of work and captures a great many important things in education.

So, that’s my list. What’s yours?

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/my-top-ten-books-on-education-this-week/feed/1The Divisions of Culturehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/the-divisions-of-culture/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/the-divisions-of-culture/#commentsSat, 19 Apr 2014 13:53:58 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1304The ‘Divisions of Culture’ is a planning tool that can help teachers and students to think in divergent ways about a subject or context. It is quite easy to use but can be extremely generative: opening up new paths for exploring and studying a subject, as well as suggesting new activities and opportunities for study.

The tool is usually presented as a grid of 18 sections or divisions, each division representing a different dimension of culture and society.

Work

Child Rearing

Embellishment

Worship

Myth & Memory

Nourishment

Learning

Travel

Celebration

Law

Health

Clothing

Leisure

Environment

Territory

It can be used in a number of ways, for example as a curriculum-mapping tool:

1. Start with a theme: The Romans
2. Think of an inquiry question: What were the effects of the Roman invasions on Britain?
3. Use the divisions of culture to map out the areas of study:

War

Roman legions & their organisationThe Iceni Revolt – its origins, events, and implicationsThe aftermath – the subjugation of the British tribes

Family

The importance of family & their roles in Roman & Celtic cultureRoman & Celtic attitudes to women (Boudicca as a queen)

Roman attitudes to work – soldiers building the wall etcThe role of slaves & slavery in Roman & Celtic culture

And so on. Many of these divisions are the kinds of themes common in the study of a subject like the Romans, but some, such as embellishment and myth and memory, might not be so common and generate new thinking on a subject. For example:

Embellishment

Study the different iconography of Roman & Celtic culturesTheir different use of shapes, themes, and motifsWhat might this tell us about their beliefs, values, and society?

Myth & Memory

How did the Romans & Celts remember? What stories did they tell?What happened to the stories of the Celts? None of the tales of the Iceni were written down. What might they have been like?Perhaps stories such as Beowulf might give us clues.

In this way the Divisions of Culture tool can help create new and interesting lines of thinking, study, and understanding. As well as suggest possible activities for developing and applying the students’ knowledge.

The Divisions of culture can also be used to develop an imaginary context, for example:

1. Start with a theme: Animals
2. Think of an inquiry question: What responsibilities do humans have to the care and protection of animals?
3. Think of a context: A team of animal experts running a wildlife park for endangered animals, preparing to open the park to the paying public.
4. Use the divisions of culture grid to plan activities and areas of study:

Child rearing

Life-cycles for different species of animalsDifferent kinds of gestations, birth, & rearing for different speciesFor example, reptiles, mammals, fish, birds, etc.

Health

Learning about the respiration, circulation, the importance of heat, etcKeeping animals health, happy, & comfortableShould they be returned to the wild?

Nourishment

Different kinds of diet for different speciesHealthy eating, the importance of water & correct nourishmentHow to feed animals safely, routines, methods?

And so on. It can also be used to suggest activities and areas of study around the running of the park as an attraction:

Learning

How could we tell people visiting the park about the animals? – Booklets, guides, interactive resources, information boards etc.Should we have a study centre, for children visiting from schools? What should we provide for them? – Study sheets, question boards etc

Environment

How can we create an environment in the park that will allow people to look at the animals close up, but keep them safe and ensure the animals are not disrupted?What about places for people to eat, relax, and keep dry if it rains?How do we keep the environment clean and free of litter?

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/the-divisions-of-culture/feed/0DfE Meeting on the new primary curriculum – 8 April, 2014http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/dfe-meeting-on-the-new-primary-curriculum-8-april-2014/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/dfe-meeting-on-the-new-primary-curriculum-8-april-2014/#commentsTue, 08 Apr 2014 19:36:22 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1298This blog is about the meeting at the DfE on April 8th, 2014 to discuss the primary national curriculum and assessment changes for implementation in September. The first part contains my notes from the meeting. The second contains a list of my thoughts on how the curriculum should be represented by the DfE as it is rolled out to schools. In my view the follow up documents to the NC are probably just as important (if not more important) than the curriculum itself, since they will give guidance to schools on how the new curriculum should be implemented. After the 2000 curriculum the QCA Schemes of Work damaged (in my opinion) the way schools organised and taught the curriculum, where as Excellence and Enjoyment had a very beneficial influence, giving schools the confidence to explore interesting ways of teaching and making the curriculum more interesting and enjoyable for their students.

Meeting notes DfE Meeting 8th April, 2014

Start 14:15

Those attending: From the the DfE: Vince Jacob, Caroline Barker, Jim Magee, and Liz Truss

Caroline – are schools keeping them? Are they being mapped across? Old levels where written for the old curriculum but don’t match the new curriculum.

Emma – things will stay the same.

Jane – What is the logic of getting rid of levels?

Caroline – National Curriculum Review – levels didn’t give the right feedback, placing ch in boxes, we want a system that doesn’t limit.

David – agree not to put ch in boxes, but ch learn the language of levels. Needs something to replace it.

Caroline -the reforms aim to give freedom around the curriculum.

Jane – testing is squeezing out of creativity in the curric to meet the SATs. esp in upper KS2.

Tim – levels were seemed to be v crude. Levels worked fine, taking out of one box and putting them in another.

Jane – you don’t need to be level 6 at KS2 to be successful. There are others ways of measuring success.

David – what’s happening is (schools and others) keep adding more and more levels

Lee – work in an RI sch – boosters & ofsted on our back, beat us with the stick – “they can’t write” – the messages we get from ofsted is often very diff from the messages we get from DfE

Caroline – The deciles idea has gone – this has been announced

Everyone relieved.

Nick – how are the performance descriptors diff from the level descriptors?

Caroline – performance descriptor gives a description of the expected standard – below, at, and above – teacher assessment against the curriculum. Expectations at the end of KS. Will be more detailed than levels. Won’t be provided for all the subjects – only Eng, maths & science. Test frameworks have just been published.

Debbie – the conversation is centring around tests… vocabulary gap is growing between the outcome and the purpose.

Emma – Intervention causes problems. [This became a theme throughout the meeting]

Jane – the tests put pressure on the ch. Ch know what the levels are and feel under pressure. Unbelievable the amount of focus. All that matters is the number on the sheet. Destroying our profession. Ch suffer when schools are forcing them all into level 4.

Jim – But, ch have to leave functionally literate.

Emma – it seems to be about subjects – what is our aim in primary curriculum?

Debbie – talks about IB. and how it joined up be big ideas.

David – Ch don’t know our history. Some children wouldn’t even recognise a lump of coal.

Tim – “But they would be able to spell coal three different ways.” (Everyone laughs)

Tim T – The aim of primary ed is to get children ready for secondary. Everyone knows this, even if they play the game that its about something else (rounded children etc). This is what the accountability and testing systems are all about. Economic imperative.

Jane – the extra-curr has been squeezed out

Liz Truss – arrives 14:57

Debbie – ch trained to pass a test, not secondary ready because they don’t have the dispositions, reliance, and trained minds to deal with the rigours of secondary

Tim T – I agree, the tests twist learning out of shape (whatever our intentions) creating square pegs for round holes. We all want round holes and round pegs to put in them, but the results of high stakes testing creates square pegs. Secondary ready doesn’t just mean literate and numerate, it means (or should mean) thoughtful, questioning, critical thinkers.

Liz – questions – what can we do without to avoid the gaming? Wider accountability how can it happen?

Jane – get rid of the tests.

Debbie – the tests don’t give us the information we need or prepare children for succeeding.

Tim – we need a more robust system – portfolios

Cherryl – we use moderation with local schools,

Liz – talks about scaled scores. and the importance of having comparing schools.

Debbie – we need to move away from sats like Finland

Liz – some of the Scandinavian schools are slipping

Debbie – schools are using survival strategies, rather than gaming. [this becomes another theme. All the teachers agree schools are ‘gaming’ the system just to survive. An unintended outcome of ofsted and Sats.

Jane – interventions left, right and centre just so they can get their levels. Ch dragged out of class – esp foundation subjects – to practice skills for the sats.

Emma – the curriculum needs to be more broad and balanced. [this becomes a theme]

Caroline – interventions – diff group.

Everyone agree ch are missing parts of the curriculum to do intervention

Liz – why is GBs use of text-books the lowest in the world? Is it because of problems with differentiation?

Lee – we’re in self-protection mode at the moment – a result of ofsted inspections

Liz – this is the problem at the moment? We want to free teachers up.

David – suggests a self-assessment portfolio for children. More structured

Caroline – there has been a number of different schs doing that.

Debbie – student portfolios.

David – why is there 80 odd pages for English, but only 2 for art & design?

David – teachers live in fear of Ofsted. If ofsted made a Broad and balanced curriculum a focus in schools – this would transform things over night.

Cherryl – asks about guidance for p-levels in special schools – we’re lacking a bit in guidance

Debbie – NC seems to ignore that some ch find it very difficult to access reading and writing

Cherryl – there should be some acknowledgement of SEN children in the curriculum

Vince – the outcomes in NC are aspirational.

Tim T – The new history curriculum contains 25% more content. The new curriculum represents a new opportunity to make changes in primary education. Let’s not repeat the same mistakes of the past – topic and subject based teaching – but explore new and more effective methods

Liz returns

Liz – asks about ofsted not looking for a preferred style, has this made a difference?

Emma – said Wilshaw letter has changed lesson obs in her school for the better

Nick – ofsted should be looking at the quality of learning (teaching is now seen as an ‘element’ of learning)

Debbie – there hs developed a culture of mistrust – got to change our language and culture of teaching

David – remarking on feedback – marking and what ofsted expect to see (best practice)

Liz – question – about how teachers spend their time?

Emma – PRP has caused a lot of extra work

Jane – Marking takes up a lot of my spare time

Everyone agree teachers are spending too much time doing paperwork and teachers are under a great deal of stress. Performance related pay is a disaster and only going to make things worse.

Liz – APP? Are schools still doing that.

There is a short discussion on APP, people don’t really see it as a problem, just boring and inconvenient. Tests are far worse, everyone agrees they are just for monitoring and comparing schools, they don’t tell us anything as teachers we don’t already know about our students.

Vince – makes the point that high performing schools use tests

Debbie – replies these are different kinds of (in class, low stress) tests, not national (all or nothing)

David – talks about stress

Debbie – asks about portfolios.

Liz – EYS – takes up a lot of time. Not that we don’t want a system that takes account of the whole child, jot just takes a long time.

Meeting ends 16:15

My thoughts on implementing and supporting the introduction of the new curriculum

Not everything in the curriculum is the same:

Knowledge Domains

Sign Systems

Sign systems are nested in and across knowledge domains

Therefore it makes sense to teach sign systems ‘in the context’ of knowledge domains. This is not the same as the cross-curricular ‘tenuous’ links made sometimes in Topic.

Important not to repeat the mistakes of the past:

Dearing Report

QCA schemes of work

Topic

Only using timetabled stand alone lessons

The new curriculum is an opportunity to think differently about how the curriculum can be planned and taught. Let’s not go back to the past.

For students to make sense of the curriculum they need to work on it, that is interact, explore, investigate, question, and reflect on the content.

They also need to use it, that is make meaning by applying and developing their knowledge, skills, and understanding, through purposeful applications. Not necessarily by means of projects or ‘real life’ applications.

Therefore, the importance of speaking and listening needs to be emphasised. This is something stressed by Hirsch, Willingham and Pinker. Literacy & numeracy can be learnt ‘explicitly’ through some direct instruction and practice (Hirsch recommends about 40mins a day), but then used and applied in knowledge domains. Vocabulary and the cognitive tools of language and thinking need to be learnt ‘implicitly’ by students having extensive, extended, opportunities for speaking and listening. Both Willingham and Hirsch stress the importance of story, narrative, tension and imagination for this reason.

The major knowledge domains in the new curriculum are History, Geography, and science. With history being by far the largest in Key Stage 2.

Schools need to bear this in mind when they are planning for the new curriculum. The new history curriculum at KS2 is about 25% larger than the old curriculum. If it is to be taught properly, in any depth, schools are going to have to dedicate significant amounts of time to its study. Possibly up to a quarter of the curriculum. The only way to do this is to ‘fold’ other areas of the curriculum into history study contexts. For example, (in context) writing opportunities, art and design, design and technology, geography, using and applying maths, and RE.

Topic planning won’t do this because topic planning makes links, but it doesn’t create context and doesn’t differentiate explicitly the differences between knowledge domains and sign systems.

Without foregrounding history in KS2, and teaching much of the rest of the curriculum through history based contexts, there will not be enough time in KS2 to study the history curriculum in any significant depth.

There is a very real chance children will leave primary with only a superficial knowledge of the history study units and very little genuine understanding.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/04/dfe-meeting-on-the-new-primary-curriculum-8-april-2014/feed/16Another Blog on Not Making Obedience a Virtuehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/03/another-blog-on-not-making-obedience-a-virtue/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/03/another-blog-on-not-making-obedience-a-virtue/#commentsSat, 29 Mar 2014 18:31:26 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1292Last week I wrote a blog about obedience. I think it is fair to say it had a mixed response. However, I did have some very interesting conversations on Twitter and there were some very thoughtful comments under the line, so I’ve decided to write a follow up.

I’d like to explore in more detail the range (as I see it) of different strategies we can draw on as teachers beyond merely getting the students to obey.

Some might say – “Why bother? Kids should just do what they are told, no questions, then we can get on with the job of teaching them.”

I’d consider this a very low expectation. The very minimum we can ask of our students is to come into a room with their mouths shut, sit where they are told, and do what’s required.

Of course, for some students even these simple rules offer a massive challenge, both to their own status and to their relationship with authority.

Are we looking to turn our schools into boot camps, with ever stricter rules and harsher punishments? Where does it stop? If we exclude those that refuse to obey, where do they go? And how do they go? What have they learnt about authority and the unbending, no compromising, power of adults? What do they do next?

As I say, it’s a massive problem and I’m not down-playing the challenge of having non-compliant students in your classroom, I’ve had plenty in my time. Head-bangers my dad calls them.

But, what is the answer? Pandering to their whims doesn’t work, neither does forcing them to obey.

We might not like it, but doing the same old things and hoping for different outcomes, is not clever.

We need to start searching for new answers to these problems. Dichotomising the argument, sneering and ridiculing (which I see often on Twitter), and dismissing the ideas of those who want to think beyond the stale old strategies, is not helping.

Happily, there are many in the edBlog/edTwitter community who are prepared to think differently and to strive to raise the debate above a battle between competing sides.

This blog is for them.

Power and Positioning

As with many things in education, Dorothy Heathcote was ahead of her time with her thinking on how power and authority should be used in the classroom.

She talked about power being something teachers hold on behalf of their students. Not over them, like a threat, but in their interests, for as long as they need it. She was not afraid to be authoritarian, learning was always the most important thing for her, but she was always looking to share her authority, and the responsibilities that came with it. She understood we can’t just thrust responsibility onto children and expect them to bear it. The transfer needs to be planned, staged, and mediated. It is a delicate process – too much responsibility, too early and the children will fail; too little responsibility, too slowly and they will learn to rely on the adults to make all the decisions.

Heathcote proposed another way of thinking about power and authority in the classroom. One that recognised the importance of control (both teacher control and the students’ self-control), but also stressed the importance of creating opportunities for students to experience, explore, and develop their own power, authority, and responsibilities. This she called positioning – the teacher positions her own power in relationship to the students’, always asking: “What do these people need now to help them learn?”

In the power-over position the teacher holds all the authority. The children are merely required to comply. In power-with the teacher positions herself as an equal partner in the use of authority, working collaboratively with the class to make decisions. In power-for the teacher gives the authority temporarily to the children and follows their lead.

Each of these positions is a strategic move, used by the teacher, to develop the children’s learning and their experience of using power and having responsibility.

Heathcote summarised her thinking in this table.

At the top the teacher has power-over the children: the teacher makes all the decisions, the children obey.

As we move down the power begins to shift towards the students. By halfway the positioning is power-with, with the teacher sharing the decision-making process with the class.

The power continues to shift as we move further down. By the bottom of the table the power is decisively with the students. Strategically the teacher has put them in charge, now they are the ones making the decisions and the teacher is uncertain what to do next.

It would be a mistake to think this is an ethical transference of power from the adult to the children, so the children can take control. It is strategic and temporary, planned and mediated by the teacher to facilitate learning. In fact, during a session the teacher is likely to move both down and up the table, positioning themselves in relation to the class and renegotiating how power is being used as the learning develops.

Of course, Heathcote was primarily interested in using imaginary contexts for learning. It is important to remember much of the experimental use of power for the children is happening in imaginary situations where people are protected if things go wrong. A good example of this transfer of decision-making happens in the Mountain Rescue context on the planning page. In this scenario there are two adults working with the class, one as a member of the team, sharing power collaboratively, (power-with); the other representing an injured climber desperately in need of the children/team’s help (power-for).

Without pretending this kind of power-positioning is either easy or straight-forward, I would argue Heathcote’s table is a fantastic resource for thinking about how power and authority can be manipulated in the classroom: and then used to generate meaningful learning opportunities to help students experiment with power and develop their own understanding about collaboration and responsibility.

I want you to make a choice. The choice is between tyranny and anarchy.

If you chose tyranny the country will be run as a dictatorship, backed up by the armed forces. Laws will be made arbitrarily in the interests of those in power. There will be no checks and balances, no free press, no independent judicial system. All that is required of every citizen is unquestioning obedience. If you don’t break the law, then you won’t get into trouble. If you do then the consequences will be dire: there will be no excuses, no opportunity to explain, no questioning of the law, just swift and certain justice.

If you chose anarchy the state will disappear. You will be allowed to do whatever you desire, without responsibility, without legal consequences, and without restraint. Of course everyone else will be allowed to do whatever they desire too. Break into your home at night, take your possessions, whatever. And there will be no police force to protect you, no legal system, no laws: Just you verses the rest of the world.

It is not much of a choice is it? What do you choose?

I choose neither.

“But that’s cheating!” You cry, “You didn’t give me that choice.”

I did, you just didn’t see it.

This is because I offered you a false choice. I made it appear as though there were only two choices, both of them bad, when in fact there was a whole range of other choices in between.

“That’s still cheating.” You mutter.

It’s a linguistic trick. Sometimes called a false dilemma or the either-or fallacy. Wikipedia defines it as: ‘The presentation of a false choice which deliberates attempt to eliminate the middle ground on an issue.’

It’s a handy debating trick because it forces your interlocutor into making a choice they don’t want to make. When they concede that one is more desirable than the other then you claim victory without having to make a real argument.

Neat, but there is a downside, once the trick is spotted it looks pretty shabby.

Which brings me to the debate on obedience.

There is an argument currently raging, in the tiny world of edTwitter, about whether students should be obedient at school. This started because a newly established Free School have decided to make student obedience one of their central tenets. @heymisssmith drew attention to this, in her usual mischievous way, and within a few short hours a full twitter-storm was blowing.

I, rather regretfully now, joined in: regretfully, because behaviour is an emotive subject amongst teachers and one of the few that is truly divisive. I wrote a blog once about behaviour on the Guardian Network and got dog’s abuse from the commentators, one called me a Judas, as a consequence I generally keep my views on the subject to myself.

However, when I saw the new school was making a virtue of obedience, putting it front and centre on their website, I thought this needed discussing.

Obedience is strong word to use. Compliant would be less emotive, well-behaved more common. But obedient is loaded, deliberately provocative, even defiant. Is this what the leaders of school wanted? It has certainly created a lot of free publicity in the world of edTwitter.

Personally, I have nothing against free schools in principle, although I understand there can be problems. And, I have absolutely no feelings what so ever about the school in question, how can I, they haven’t even opened yet: certainly if you want a neo-trad education for your kids then this school is the place to send them.

However, I do have a problem with making student obedience a virtue and here is my argument: take or leave it, you always have a choice.

Binary opposites

The choice between obedience and disobedience is a false dilemma. As I explained earlier, those that try to frame the argument in this way are attempting to eliminate the middle ground and force those they disagree with into making a choice they don’t want to make. This is a shoddy ploy because it closes down the discussion and demonizes those that want to debate the issue.

Obedience and disobedience are not mutually exclusive terms in the way on and off are, or up and down, left and right, they are binary opposites: two ends of a spectrum, like boiling and freezing, saintly and evil, tyranny and anarchy. In between the two extremes are a whole range of other possibilities.

Sometimes these possibilities are neutral, like the ones between boiling and freezing – warm, tepid, chilly, icy etc – and sometimes they are not, like the ones between tyranny and anarchy – benevolent dictatorship, liberal democracy etc.

In my view, neither obedience nor disobedience are desirable outcomes in a place of learning. They are two extreme ends of a continuum, both unwanted possibilities. I believe we should avoid both and focus on the range of other more desirable and effective options that exist in between.

In fact, let’s start by all agreeing no sane person chooses disobedience as an option: no one wants kids running schools and no one wants anarchy.

Just as, I would hope, no one wants unquestioning, blind obedience, from children to adults.

We are, all of us somewhere in between the two. Some of us lean more towards one end than the other. Some more towards the discipline end of the spectrum, others more towards the freedom end. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.

So, let’s have no more of the false dichotomies, no more trying to polarize opinions, and no more shutting down the debate. Let’s move on and accept there are differences of emphasis, some differences of values and points of view, but, essentially, at the bottom of all this, is a general agreement we all want what is best for the students in our schools.

With this in mind, I propose we debate on the subject professionally, without silly points scoring and shoddy debating tricks. Please.

My problem with the term, obedience

It is problematic to make a virtue of obedience. Of course children must behave in ways that allow themselves and others to learn, and for teachers to teach. We all want that. But schools are places of learning, places for thinking, questioning, acquiring and applying knowledge, places for developing new skills, places for finding out about the world and for meeting people outside of our own families.

Obedience is not an end, it is not something we want to foster and develop, it is a final resort. To be used when all else fails, a kind of defcon 1: “If you want to stay here then you have to let others learn and your teachers teach.” Sadly, this happens. No one wants it, but it does happen.

However, this is the end of the line, not the beginning. We shouldn’t start out assuming our students are just waiting to tear the place apart and the only thing standing between school order and total chaos is a thin tweed line of teacher authority.

Hobbes famously argued humans are motivated entirely by selfish concerns (notably fear of death), and given half a chance would act upon these selfish concerns and take what they can. Therefore, those with power (the absolute monarchy, the only rational and desirable form of government) should ensure the masses are never given the chance. Hence, it is in everyone’s interest (but most of all those with power and property) to maintain order by punishing those that transgress.

Sound familiar?

Two things about Hobbes: First, he was writing in the 17th century in the aftermath of a terrible civil war, making an argument for the restoration of the monarchy. Second, he was writing about society as a whole, large groups of people, who have little or no connection with each other, not about smaller communities of people who share time and common goals, like families and classrooms.

Of course, you can build a school based on Hobbes’ ideas. And you can believe his pessimistic view of human nature if you like. I choose not to.

In my experience (other experiences are available) children are not looking to wreck their school, they are not itching to tear each apart, and they are not motivated entirely by selfish concerns. They are, actually, quite nice. They just want to be treated, like the rest of us with respect. They want to be heard and they want to have a say in their lives. Including their school lives. And why not?

Let me make clear, I’m not saying things don’t go wrong or that there should be no repercussions for anti-social behaviour. To argue this would be mad. I’m saying we should start by building classroom communities on the basis of trust and mutual respect, not unquestioning obedience to adult authority.

Obedience is for dogs. We should have higher aspirations for our students.

I advocate ‘co-operation’ as the term to use. I’ve used it for twenty years and my classrooms have never once descended into anarchy.

Co-operation puts the focus on understanding rather than obedience. Obedience only demands our students do as they are told (because we have more power than they do), co-operation requires students to understand why learning requires certain kinds of behaviour. For those of you who like Dweck, obedience develops a fixed mindset, while co-operation develops a growth mindset.

“What happens when children don’t co-operate?” Is a fair question. The answer is we stop co-operating with them. Why should we (as a community) put up with someone who refuses to let us learn? Disrupts our lessons? Shouts abuse? The answer is we shouldn’t. It’s a simple choice, the job at school is learning, everyone has a responsibility to help this happen. That’s what it means to co-operate.

“Aren’t you just splitting hairs?” Is another fair question. I’d say, no. The difference is subtle, but profound. Talking about co-operation with students makes the way authority works explicit. It opens up the reasons for rules and the benefits of being part of a community to scrutiny and discussion.

Not, however, for negotiation. This is a mistake I’ve heard people make. There are layers of responsibilities we are all subject to, including adults. Schools are not hippy communes where the inhabitants can make up the rules and do as they like. They are places of learning. That means any rules we create must bear this higher cause in mind. You mind call it the ‘prime directive’.

Making co-operation a virtue seems to me a much higher and more ambitious aim. Obedience is easy: just scare the blighters by shouting at them and threatening them with terrible consequences. Creating a community of like-minded people who co-operate and do their best because they want to learn, that is a lot harder and something genuinely worthwhile.

Last Friday I spent the day working in a mobile with a wonderful class of Year 5/6. The topic they are studying is the Roman Invasions, which they are enjoying enormously. Their teacher, ‘Mr D.’ (as the children call him), asked if I would plan a day exploring with his students the events of the Iceni revolt.

The Roman Invasions are one of my favourite areas of study in the curriculum and the students in Mr D’s class are among the most switched on I’ve ever taught: focused, self-organised, and eager to learn. They particularly enjoy learning using drama and I was excited to have the whole day to work with them.

In my planning I started by asking myself questions: What must it have been like for the Iceni people when the Romans invaded? What sacrifices where they prepared to make? What resistance could they muster? At what point did they accept defeat?

These inquiry questions led on to questions about narrative and evidence: What part did the story of Boudicca play in the invasion and settlement? How do we know she poisoned herself? Where did this story come from? In whose interest was it for the story to be believed?

Thinking about these questions helped me to form the outline of an imaginary context, one the students could populate, and I could use to generate opportunities for them to develop knowledge and understanding of the subject. I asked myself, who at the time of Boudicca might be involved with her death and know the truth? And, why might their story have been forgotten?

I decided to create an Iceni community with the class using dramatic-inquiry and incorporating a set of balsa wood model roundhouses the children had built in DT.

The community, I planned, would be one that was just beginning to come to terms with the defeat of Boudicca’s army when they are faced with a terrible dilemma: one that would test their loyalty and instincts for self-preservation to the limit. In the dead of night, with a Roman legion close by, they are visited by a bedraggled Queen Boudicca desperately asking for sanctuary for herself and her daughters.

What should the community do? Hand over their queen to the Romans? Hide her and hope the Romans don’t find her? Or try to smuggle her past the Roman lines?

This seemed an exciting narrative for the children to be involved with, one that would hopefully engage them and give them a meaty predicament, getting to the heart of the inquiry questions I wanted them to study.

The next stage in my planning was thinking about how to induct the class into the imaginary context. Mr D told me they already knew quite a lot about the Romans and the Iceni, so I didn’t need to start from scratch. However, I wanted to give them the opportunity to share their knowledge and understanding and to establish some firm foundations for the work we were going to build together. With this is mind I chose to use a painting I’ve used many times before: Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar (1899), by Lionel Royer

A word of warning

There are many advantages to using a painting as a starting-point for an inquiry, but the painting won’t do the teaching for us. It is a resource and nothing more. We cannot expect the students to discover the curriculum from just looking at it and talking to each other.

Recently, I’ve read a couple of accounts from people using this activity badly in the classroom and then making the procedural error of assuming there is something wrong with the activity rather than their own teaching. Both of these people were teachers for a short while and have since given it up for a career in telling the rest of us where we are going wrong. I’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions from this.

But in defence of the activity, the teacher’s role is not passive, merely facilitating the learning by providing the resource and giving the students the time and space to find out things for themselves. But far more active: asking questions, providing information, and, yes, telling the students things they don’t know. There will be periods of time when the students are doing most of the talking and there will periods of time when they will be listening as the teacher talks, this is a two-way process of what might rather grandly be called ‘meaning-making’.

Using a painting to develop knowledge and understanding

To return to the work I did with the Year 5/6 class on Friday. This is an account of how the first session developed using the Vercingetorixpainting as a starting point.

[Step1: describing the painting]

I started by showing the painting on the white-board:

“I’d like to show you a painting. It’s quite old, but not as old as the events it portrays. It was actually painted nearly 2,000 years later during the 19th century, in France, at a time when the country was forming a new identity. Please keep this in mind. The artist wasn’t there at the time these events happened and is interpreting them as he wants us to see them. Please take a close look. All I would ask at first is that you say what you notice.”

Sometimes students start to interpret the meaning of the painting or try guessing what is happening. If this happens I ask them just to describe what they can see as accurately as possible. Sometimes this can take a little while, but it is an important step.

“Hold on to those thoughts for just a moment, we will becoming back to them very quickly, but just for now can you say only what you can see. For example – I can see a man on a horse pointing empty handed towards a pile of weapons on the floor.”

As the students worked I helped them to use precise language, modelling it for them as necessary, and asking them to try and imagine they are describing the painting for someone who can’t see it.

I’ve found this can be a useful exercise in preparing children for writing. Giving them the chance to use and experiment with different words and ways of describing things and events.

[Step 2: interpreting]

“In art nothing is included by accident. This is not a photograph of the event, but a painting, painted hundreds of years later. The artist has thought carefully about every tiny detail and what it might mean to a person looking at it. For example, what do you make of this man kneeling here with his arms tied behind his back?”

As the students worked through this process they began to share some of their own knowledge. I encouraged them by asking clarification and deepening questions.

After a while I encouraged them to start speculating: “Um, I see. So you think this man might be the king’s brother. Is he hoping to free him do you think?”

[Step 3 – Some background information]

Of course, speculation only got them so far and they were, by this point, eager to hear more about what was happening in the painting.

“If it helps I can tell you more about this painting. It was actually painted in 1899 in France, nearly 2,000 years after the event. It depicts the surrender of a Celtic chieftain, called Vercingetorix (werkiŋˈɡetoriks – try www.howjsay.com for a pronunciation) who lead a revolt against Roman power. Here he is surrendering to the Roman Emperor, Julius Caesar. After this, he was imprisoned for five years, then paraded through Rome in chains and finally executed.”

I spent the next ten minutes telling the students about the history of the Roman invasions and about the elements of the painting they had not discovered for themselves or had misunderstood. I told them about Julius Caesar, I told them about the Roman’s fascination for power and order, I told them about the Celts’ iconography and about their religious beliefs. After I’d finished I gave them the opportunity to ask questions.

I’d like to stress that this is about communicating knowledge to the students. If you do this activity make sure you chose a painting that will get to the heart of the curriculum and make sure you have a good understanding of the history you want the children to learn. I reiterate, the painting will not do the teaching and the children cannot discover the curriculum by just looking at it.

The advantage in doing this way is that, hopefully, the painting you have chosen, and the stories you have woven into it, will capture the students’ attention so that they are ready and interested to listen to the information you want to convey.

While Just looking at a picture won’t do the job of teaching the curriculum effectively, neither will just telling them and expecting them to listen. The knowledge will simply slide out of their minds by the end of playtime. Making learning memorable is at the heart of our practice and both Willingham and Hirsch stress the importance of story, narrative, and tension to the learning process.

[Step 4: reflection and further study]

The next step was to build on this new knowledge and help the students to make connections and inferences.

“So, what can we make of these people, the Celts and the Romans? I’m wondering if by looking at the painting, the way they are dressed, their weapons, their banners and everything else, we might be able to say something about them as different cultures. For example, what about the different shapes of their shields and their motifs?”

I began a discussion about the contrast between the straight, angular, lines of the Roman designs and the more rounded, organic, shapes of the Celts. And what this observation (and others) might say about them as different cultures and what was important to them.

The students began to use post-it notes to collect their thoughts and ideas. We used two colours, one for them to write the things they knew about the Celts and the Romans. The other for questions they would like to know more about.

I suggested they might use the topic books they had in the classroom to help them as they worked.

You may have noticed there is a narrative argument currently popular among some education commentators that lays the blame for all our educational ills at the door of the progressive movement.

This argument makes the claim that the progressive movement is built on a central principle, originating from the French philosopher Rousseau, that children are natural learners who learn best when they are left alone to discover things for themselves. This is a mistake, they say, which has distorted and corrupted our system of education in the 20th century and resulted in a facile curriculum and ineffective teaching methods.

Progressivism has become so deeply embedded in the system, the argument continues, educators and curriculum designers are not even aware of its malign influence on their thinking. It has even permeated the very language of educational discourse, making it almost impossible to stand outside the system and analyse it dispassionately.

It is a beguiling narrative because it allows us to blame the educators of the past for our current ills and gives us the chance to wipe the slate clean and start again. Much of our beloved secretary of state’s pronouncements have used this argument allowing him to justify his neo-liberal reforms as the sweeping away of the evils of trendy teaching that have infected our schools since the 1960s. Apparently freeing schools from the corrupting influence of progressivists in the local authorities and universities will allow them flourish and grow again. A bit like a garden after it has been weeded.

Leaving aside for the moment whether the ‘blame the progressives’ argument has any merit (I plan to write about this soon), being labelled as a progressivist in such a highly charged and hostile environment – you’re either right or you’re wrong’ – is not a comfortable state of affairs. Who wants to be considered a weed?

It is, therefore, I would suggest, important to be clear about what we mean by progressivism and what it is to be a progressivist. Since being on the wrong side of the argument runs the risk of being an apologist for everything that is, and has even been, wrong with the system.

The rest of this blog, then, is an attempt to uncover the fundamental principles that underpin progressivism: that is the ideas, values, and theories that make it a distinct ideology. Readers can then examine their own ideas, values, and theories against this list and decide for themselves if they are what might called, a progressivist.

First, some history…

Herbert Spencer

Kieran Egan, an educational philosopher at Simon Fraser University, has written extensively on the subject of progressivism. In his 2002 book, ‘Getting it Wrong from the Beginning’ he argues the true founding father of progressivism is the Victorian philosopher, Herbert Spencer.

Now, little remembered, Spencer was a super star in his day, feted and honoured in both Britain and the USA, and sold over a million books in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Although influenced indirectly by Rousseau (he never actually read ‘Emile’ because he was horrified by socialism and all its associated ideas [p.24]), Spencer was most influenced by the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century that proved everything in the universe is in not fixed, as once believed, but in a constant state of change or, as he saw it, progress.

Spencer took this discovery and made a universal theory of it, which included educating the young.

As Egan writes, “Spencer proposed we live in a dramatic universe that is subject to constant change and this change follows developmentally from the simple to the complex. We can see the same laws operating in the cosmos at large, in the evolution of species, in the development of societies in history, and in the changes from the child is to the adult’s mind.” [p.15]

This idea of universal progress (progressivism) took hold and was expanded in the twentieth century by educationalists, such as Dewey and Piaget, and became the dominant ideology for thinking about and planning for education in Britain and the USA, even by people who had never heard of Herbert Spencer.

The principles of progressivism

The central tenet of Spencer’s pedagogy is the claim that children’s understanding can only expand from things they have direct experience of. Therefore, educators should always start from what the child already knows and progress from there. This is a natural process, Spencer argues, because children are naturally inquiring, constructing, and active beings. “We must constantly conform to the natural process of mental evolution. We develop in a certain sequence and we require a certain kind of knowledge at each stage.” [p.17]

From this starting place Spencer laid out seven principles for intellectual development:

1. We should proceed from the simple to the complex.

2. Development of the mind, as all other development, is an advance from the indefinite to the definite.

3. Our lessons ought to start from the concrete and end in the abstract.

4. The education of the child must accord, both in mode and arrangement, with the education of mankind, considered historically.

5. In each branch of instruction we should proceed from the empirical to the rational.

6. In education, the process of self-development should be encouraged to the utmost. Therefore, children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible.

7. Students should find the experience of learning pleasurable. [pp. 17–20]

Decide for yourself

I don’t have the time to go into each of these principles in detail – if you are interested then I recommend Egan’s book, it is both erudite and accessible – but these bare bones should be enough for readers to use as a checklist against their own principles and to decide if they correspond enough to justify the label, progressivist.

For my part, I don’t think it is enough to call someone a progressivist just because they are not convinced by the values and methods of traditional education. Neither, is it justified to call someone a progressivist just because they desire similar outcomes to those who are happy to carry the label. Rather, I would argue, progressivism is a distinct ideology (as outlined in the seven principles above), which either you adhere to or you don’t. If you read through the list and find yourself agreeing with most, if not all, of Spencer’s principles then I would say you’re a progressivist. If, on the other hand, you read through the list and you find yourself disagreeing more than agreeing, then I would say you’re not.

And don’t let people tell you otherwise.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/03/are-you-a-progressivist/feed/12Getting it wrong from the beginning: Our progressivist inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piagethttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/03/getting-it-wrong-from-the-beginning%e2%80%a8-our-progressivist-inheritance-from-herbert-spencer-john-dewey-and-jean-piaget/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/03/getting-it-wrong-from-the-beginning%e2%80%a8-our-progressivist-inheritance-from-herbert-spencer-john-dewey-and-jean-piaget/#commentsMon, 03 Mar 2014 17:10:07 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1261This is not really a blog, just a copy and paste job from Kieran Egan’s website

I hope I’m not breaking any etiquette doing this. You can read the original page here: Introduction

I’ve decided to post it here because I have become increasingly frustrated in recent weeks by the way terms such as Progressivism, Discovery Learning, and Constructivism are being used interchangeably and generally negatively. In my opinion this is very unhelpful and does us no credit as a profession. I’m not a scholar or an educational theorist (like Egan), just a teacher, but I am genuinely concerned at some of the dismissive and reductivist language and mis-use of terminology that seems be developing among educational blogging.

“Getting it Wrong from the Beginning” is critical of progressive education and the school systems that developed out of it, but Egan is reasoned and rational. He avoids the polemic rhetoric that besmirches much of the criticism of progressivism we find in blogs. Further, he understands his subject and doesn’t misrepresent, misunderstand, or reduce his argument to platitudes.

I recommend “Getting it Wrong from the Beginning” and Egan’s his other work.

Note: Here are two critiques of Egan, with thanks to @ManYanaEd for pointing them out to me:

Imagine it is the year 1887 and you are a forty-five-year-old white middle-class man traveling by train into a medium-sized American town. You would likely see some new buildings going up. Perhaps the biggest is a factory, and nearby are the shells of houses for the workers, and perhaps a new church and school are being built. You are financially comfortable and aware that your personal wealth and that of your neighbors is growing as a direct or indirect result of the products of the new factories and the trade they generate. The town’s population is increasing, there are more, and more varied, shops and services, and new inventions are transforming your life.

Let us say you know that the factory under construction, which you are turning to look at as you pass by, will make equipment for the new electric lighting system. Your home is now lighted by gas, with a few older kerosene lamps for use in upstairs rooms. You would know that a decade ago Sir Joseph Wilson Swan had invented a new incandescent lamp by heating carbon filaments in a glass bulb from which air was partially evacuated. In the following year, Thomas Alva Edison came up with the same idea, but unlike the Englishman, Edison developed plans for the power lines and equipment needed to establish a practical lighting system. You can foresee this new electric light replacing the less safe, less clean, and less efficient system you now use.

All this change, these buildings and inventions, the growing town and shifting patterns in people’s lives, you recognize, somewhat proudly, as progress. Being a progressive modern man you have learned the ideas propounded by other white middle-class men during the past half-century or so. Unlike all your ancestors, and unlike all people in other than modern Western societies, you confidently believe that the world developed from a mass of molten matter to its present life-supporting form, that life itself evolved from the simplest bugs to that pinnacle of life on the planet—yourself—and that civilizations have similarly evolved from primitive beginnings to the inventive sophistication of your own. This social evolution from primitive to modern societies, you recognize, has not, of course, been uniform; many societies remain in a developmentally “primitive” condition, still living a life reflective of “the childhood of mankind.” You understand the now-common phrase “the childhood of mankind” as capturing the sense in which “primitive” people’s minds are inferior to your modern mind much as children’s minds are inferior to those of adults.

As a progressive modern man you will have read the celebrated and influential essay written thirty years ago by Herbert Spencer called “Progress: Its Law and Cause.” Spencer had persuaded you, and many others, that “progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity” (Spencer 1966, 60). He had established that this underlying law was “displayed in the progress of civilization as a whole, as well as in the progress of every nation; and is still going on with increasing rapidity” (19). That factory, those new houses, and the train you are riding in are all confirming evidence of his compelling argument.

As your train carries you on, at a speed and with a comfort unimaginable to any traveler before you in history, you recognize that the physical and social changes you see are reflected in, or are products of, a ferment of new ideas. The number and novelty of these new ideas is disruptive on a scale never before experienced. The result creates anxiety in those who see the foundations of their old intellectual world being threatened but is exhilarating to progressive minds like yours.

Let us say, as you passed that school being built, you turned to look at it with a particular and professional interest because you are a recently appointed senior official of this newly organized school division. The ferment of ideas you are aware of will prominently include those about education. You hold decided ideas about how the new state schools should go about educating all the children in society for the New World. The new world that is tangibly coming into form around you would be the world they will inhabit, and you are keenly aware that it will be quite unlike the world you grew up in. Your educational ideas have also been influenced by the redoubtable Mr. Spencer, an Englishman born in 1820 who has written at length about education, as he has written about nearly every other topic a modern man might turn his mind to. Spencer made a triumphant lecture tour around America in 1882, and, let us say, you attended two of his exciting talks. His ideas about education draw on the same fundamental principles that undergird his progressive arguments about the development of life, of civilization, and of individuals’ potential.

Well, let us imagine now that you are you—a tougher call, perhaps—and consider our man on the train from the outside. He was an agent in creating the kind of schools we still have. He, and hundreds like him, shaped the new schools under the influence of a set of powerful educational ideas. During the late nineteenth century, the modern apparatus for schooling everyone was put in place. My topic is the ideas about education that shaped these new state schools into the forms we have lived with ever since, and particularly the ideas about children’s minds, and their modes of learning and development, which have determined the curriculum and the organization of schools.

In the 1850s, Herbert Spencer wrote four essays on education. They were published separately in journals, but he had intended from the beginning that they would appear as a single volume. That volume was published in New York under the title Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical in 1860 and in London the following year. By the end of the 1860s the book had appeared in fifteen editions from seven publishers. During the 1870s it was reprinted in New York nine times by D. Appleton alone, and in the 1880s there were fifteen printings, all but two in the United States. (The laxness of copyright laws, especially concerning foreign publications, helps account for this proliferation.) In the 1890s, it seems, a slowdown in popularity occurred, with only thirteen printings during the decade, including editions from seven American publishers. Appleton itself sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

The later nineteenth century was a crucial period for educational thinking. Rapid population growth, industrial development, and the beginnings of universal schooling coincided with reverberations from the stunning theory of evolution. Herbert Spencer stood at this crux. He drew on a range of new ideas and shaped a set of educational principles that became and have remained fundamental in the thinking of those who have had responsibility for our schools, even if their historical source has become invisible to those who hold them.

The historian of education Lawrence Cremin has described the 1890s as revolutionary for American education. He cites the influential books that appeared in that decade, including William James’s Principles of Psychology in 1890 and his Talks to Teachers on Psychology in 1899, Francis W. Parker’s Talks on Pedagogics in 1894, Edward L. Thorndike’s Animal Intelligence in 1898, and John Dewey’s School and Society in 1899. Cremin might have extended his time frame a little to include G. Stanley Hall’s two-volume Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education in 1904. These “revolutionaries” had in common the fact that they were all profoundly influenced by Spencer’s work: “If the revolution had a beginning, it was surely with the work of Herbert Spencer” (Cremin 1961, 91). In the generation after Spencer’s death, it was uncontentious to claim for the collection of educational essays he wrote that “more than any other single text-book it is the foundation of all the so-called ‘modern’ ideas in education” (Samuel and Elliot 1917, 176).

“By the 1950s,” Cremin has also claimed, “the more fundamental tenets of the progressives had become the conventional wisdom of American education” (1976, 19). And many people today assert that our schools’ ineffectiveness is due precisely to the influence of these progressivist ideas. But those sympathetic to progressivism tend to be irritated by such statements, because from their point of view, schools and teaching are dominated by the same old dull approaches to education that they have been trying to change for more than a century. And they believe that our schools’ ineffectiveness is due precisely to the influence of these traditionalist ideas. Progressivism, in their view, has never been implemented. In the 1960s, Paul Goodman, echoing many before him and echoed since by many others, argued that as soon as attempts are made to apply progressivist ideas in schools, the ideas become “entirely perverted” (1964, 43); their radical nature first is watered down and then sinks into the persisting stale routines of the traditional classroom.

In this book I wish will to show incidentally that both of these claims—that progressivist ideas have become central to educational thinking and that they have never been implemented on a significant scale—are largely true.

What ideas make up progressivism? The central belief—the most fundamental tenet—of progressivism is that to educate children effectively it is vital to attend to children’s nature, and particularly to their modes of learning and stages of development, and to accommodate educational practice to what we can discover about these. That this belief is shared almost universally among educators today supports Cremin’s observation about how widely progressivism’s tenets have become the conventional wisdom of American education, and Western education generally. But it is precisely this belief that I shall will show is mistaken.

My argument will be unfamiliar, I think. I shall not be arguing against progressivism on the basis of the usual alternatives of “liberal” or “traditional” theories of education or because it is not adequately attuned to preparing students for jobs. My critique will be unfamiliar also, I suspect, because it will be coming from someone who has considerable sympathy with progressivist ideals.

Progressivism has historically involved a belief in attending to the nature of the child, and consequently its research arm (so to speak) has involved studies to expose that nature more precisely. Because the mind is prominent in education, psychology became the consistent scientific handmaiden of progressivism. The psychologist exposes the nature of students’ learning or development and the practitioner then must make teaching methods and curricula accord with what science has exposed. (“Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities. . . . It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. . . . The law for presenting and treating [educational] material is the law implicit within the child’s own nature” [Dewey 1964, 430, 435].)

One or another form of progressivism has been promoted and tried in the schools of North America since the beginning of mass schooling in the late nineteenth century. Progressivist practices have usually been promoted on the grounds that if only teachers will attend to the new knowledge gained by research about learning or development and follow what that research implies for teaching or curricula, an educational revolution will occur. In each new generation, progressivist educators have first to explain what was wrong with their predecessors’ attempts to implement the ideas—because the promised revolution consistently fails to occur—and then to explain why their new approach will do the job.

So we may see the attraction the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) has had for progressivists. Piaget claimed to expose in a new and fuller way the nature of children’s intellectual development, and from his work progressivist educators sought to learn how to apply those insights to educational practice. Or we may see the attraction of the cognitive science research that Howard Gardner uses to support what he has described as his “sympathy with the vision generally termed ‘progressive'” (1991, 189). The problems with past attempts to implement progressivist ideas are, he thinks, reparable by drawing on “recent advances in our understanding of individual learning” (246).

My task, then, is to expose a flaw in what seem to me the most widely held beliefs among educators today. Although the ideas that I think are false are foundational to progressivism, they seem also to be held by many who might even consider themselves critics of progressivism—which is where Cremin’s observation about the movement’s tenets having become the conventional wisdom of American education comes in.

My subtitle includes some of the main figures whose work has shaped the modern forms of progressivism and modern conceptions of education. Of the three I mention, the least well known today is Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), whose crucial role in the formation of progressivism and whose influence on modern schooling seem to me much underestimated, for reasons I describe in Chapter 1. This may seem an oddly balanced work, in which Spencer receives the lion’s share of attention and John Dewey (1859–1952), for example, is represented as drawing significantly on Spencer’s work. Perhaps it might seem a little offensive to identify what is usually thought of as a quintessentially American movement as derived significantly from the work of another dead white European male. Causality in ideas is, of course, difficult to trace with any security. Spencer’s is certainly just one of many voices promoting not dissimilar ideas during those years on both sides of the Atlantic. Even so, although you may take the centrality of Spencer in my account as merely a kind of rhetorical stand-in for others, those constant reprintings of his book strongly suggest that it was his words that were most read. Spencer allied Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s somewhat romantic view of educating with the authority of science, showing how child-centeredness and science together could provide the engine that would modernize and transform education. Also, not entirely coincidentally, this emphasis on Spencer is a kind of backhanded homage on the centenary of his death in 1902.

But this is not a work of history. I do consider some historical figures, but only because it is sometimes easier to disinter the ideas that have been loaded with layers of complexity over the years by looking at their earlier appearance and then seeing how they have gradually transmuted into today’s presuppositions. It is a way of trying to make strange what is so familiar that we find it hard to think about. My topic is current education and how the persistence of powerful progressivist ideas continues to undermine our attempts to make schooling more effective.

“The world is largely ruled by ideas, true and false,” observed the American historian Charles A. Beard (1932, ix). He went on to quote a “British wit” to the effect that “the power which a concept wields over human life is nicely proportioned to the degree of error in it” (ix). We needn’t give in to such cynicism, of course, but the witty point pricks because it sometimes seems true. The power that Spencer’s ideas have wielded over educational thinking is a sharp example of just this point.

In Chapter 1, I outline some of the basic ideas of progressivism, showing their early expressions in the work of Herbert Spencer. I also consider the strange case of Spencer’s immense influence and almost vanished reputation. In Chapters 2 through 4, I look at progressivist ideas about learning, development, and the curriculum. In each case I begin with Spencer’s formulations—which will, I suspect, surprise many readers, as they may have come to take such ideas as obviously true and might even believe them to have been originally Dewey’s ideas. I show how such figures as Dewey and Piaget elaborated these ideas, how they have found their way into current practice, and how they have been wrong from their beginning and haven’t become any less wrong for a century’s reiteration. In Chapter 5, I argue that much modern educational research is flawed by related presuppositions to those I identify in progressivism. Throughout, I indicate the direction we need to move in to get beyond the pervasive flaw.

When I mentioned to a colleague the proposed title of this book–“Getting it wrong from the beginning”–he said cheerfully, “Ah, an autobiographical work!” I have indeed been trying for some years to work out a way of describing an alternative view of how we might better educate children in the modern world.This book may be seen as of companion to two others, the slim center between two larger chunks of text. The first of this trilogy of sorts is The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and the third is skulking under some aggressive, and provisional, title such as “How to Educate People” forthcoming from Yale University Press. All three explore related issues, and there are necessarily small overlaps in each of them. The books form part of a project to provide a fundamental critique of current educational theories and practice and to outline an alternative that might move us toward more effective schooling in modern societies. I want to make the case here that most of the beliefs most of the people hold about education today are wrong in fairly fundamental ways. But as my colleague, with the unfortunately damaged knees, declared, maybe I’m getting it wrong. But that’s for you to decide.

Topic planning has been popular in primary schools since the early 1970s. Its proponents maintain it can create coherent study links across different subject areas. And there is no doubt, in the hands of an experienced teacher, planning methodically and systematically, it can be used to plan engaging and relevant activities for cross-curricular learning.

However, as an approach, it does have some significant drawbacks that can make it difficult to use well and sometimes result, when used badly, in ineffective learning experiences for students.

1. Topic planning sometimes lacks content

I learnt to plan using topics on my PGCE course at University. The method was to choose a topic area, for example ancient Egypt, and then think of relevant areas of study and activities that were related to the topic.

Ancient Egypt was a good topic because it involved a lot of content and made straightforward, coherent, links across subject areas. History topics generally have these strengths.

However, some topics lack subject content and can quickly lose structure and coherence. I remember one my friends on the course came completely unstuck trying to plan and teach a topic called, Mushrooms.

What she discovered was that a topic on mushrooms does not in itself make natural and coherent links across the curriculum. Neither does it create much interest for the students: unlike making mummies and exploring tombs for example. Therefore, she had to work hard to invent activities, of a mushroom theme, that both linked across the curriculum and grabbed her students’ attention – such as making mushroom soup and writing mushroom poems – rather than concentrating on activities that developed their existing knowledge and skills. Every activity, as a consequence, either stood or fell on whether the students were interested in it or not, and not on whether it was educationally valuable.

This is a real problem for some topics. Not all lack subject content, but for those that do – like Mushrooms – then there is a tendency for the topic to lead the learning, rather than for the learning to lead the topic. Students’ needs, in regards to the content of the curriculum, take second place, as the teacher is forced to spend their time and energy creating activities that are linked to the subject of the topic, rather than concentrating on making the activities meaningful, coherent, and relevant.

2. Topic planning sometimes lacks meaning

Learning is about meaning making, that is students studying the content of the curriculum and, with a teacher’s help, converting that content into something meaningful inside their own minds. Primary schools generally value creating links across the curriculum because they believe it helps their students to make meaning, by linking skills, knowledge, and understanding, from one area of the curriculum, to those from another.

However, sometimes when this is done through a topic, the topic itself can be a distraction, and get in the way of students’ making sense of what they are studying and how it joins up with their existing knowledge.

This is not just a problem with topic; other kinds of curriculum planning can suffer just as much from the same problem. However, it is only topic that puts a theme (ancient Egypt, mushrooms) at the centre of the planning process and then builds learning opportunities, curriculum exploration, and lesson activities from there. Other kinds of planning approaches start with what they want the children to learn and then build activities and experiences from that starting point. It is, therefore, even more important for a teacher using the topic approach to be aware of what learning is being developed when they plan an activity. Sloppy topic planning can very easily lead to classroom activities that are more about making tenuous links to the theme, than they are about incremental and rational development of student learning.

3. Topic planning sometimes lacks purpose

It is easy to see how topics generate links across the curriculum and how they help to make it easier for teachers to plan. Their design can be a creative process and many primary school teachers enjoy building elaborate topic webs around their favourite themes. Library topic boxes and publishers’ catalogues make them easy to resource and there is a whole book industry built around topic planning, activities, and displays.

However, it is not so easy to see how they generate purposeful learning.

What is the purpose of a topic exactly?

For example, what is the purpose of the ancient Egypt topic? Study, obviously, but what else? Is there a reason, a purpose, or an outcome to the children’s work or is the topic just something the children study because the teacher asks them to?

For some teachers that will be enough, and for some topics the content alone will probably justify its study. But, can we say this is true of all topics? Certainly, I would suggest, not the one on mushrooms. What was the purpose of that?

My point is, the topic planning process does not mandate a purpose for the children’s work. Teachers using topic might introduce a purpose – the creation of an Egyptian museum for example – or – a real world purpose, like a parent’s assembly, where the students share their learning – but these kinds of activities are not something planned into all topics, they are extra and cover up some of its deficiencies. Many topics taught in primary schools do not include a teacher planned purpose and suffer as a consequence.

Although there are some advantages to topic planning – it makes links across the curriculum, it can make planning easier and more interesting for teachers, and can make the curriculum more meaningful and engaging for students – it also contains some serious weaknesses when done badly.

Careful and systematic planning and preparation can mitigate some of these disadvantages, but a great deal depends on the subject content of the topic and the teacher planning in extra activities and outcomes to create added purpose and meaning.

Would it be better then to teach by discreet subjects in primary school?

Undoubtedly, yes, for some of the time. And this is what every primary school in the country does in practice: PE, music, maths, and phonics are often taught as discrete lessons. However, there are two major disadvantages to teaching the whole of the curriculum subject by subject in primary schools.

1. Time

Switching from one subject to another every hour or so is a very inefficient use of time. Time that could be better spent learning is wasted preparing for the next subject, reorganising the classroom, collecting resources, etc. Primary schools recognise it makes much more sense to cover two or three subjects in the same time period, than it does to keep switch between subjects with all the kerfuffle this involves.

2. Making meaning

The primary school curriculum requires children to develop knowledge, skills, and understanding in ten different knowledge domains from the age of six. By any measure this is a tall order. But parcelling up every knowledge domain into a separate lesson, with different activities that don’t link with the previous lesson’s activities, makes this order even taller. Primary school teachers know this approach doesn’t work with primary school children, it is ineffective, loses many, and leaves others behind.

Subject teaching has its place in primary schools, the teaching of discrete lessons is sometimes the best and most efficient approach, but as a single strategy it has very serious and important drawbacks that make it impractical and ineffective.

An alternative approach to planning

As I hope I’ve explained, both topic planning and subject-based planning have their strengths. My aim in writing this blog is not to rubbish these approaches, but to point out some of their weaknesses and flaws. Topic planning, in the hands of a well-organised teacher, can be a very effective and engaging strategy for exploring the curriculum. And subject based planning already plays an important role in primary schools. Nevertheless, even combining both strategies, which in effect is what most primary schools currently do, is not, in my opinion, the best approach available.

An alternative is to take the best elements of topic planning, combined with the rigour and application of subject-based learning, add elements that are missing from both, and create a new, different, approach.

In Drama for Learning, Heathcote recommended primary teachers use an inquiry-based approach for planning the curriculum. One that built imaginary contexts in the classroom, where the students took on the point of view of a responsible team, and explored the curriculum through activities required by working on commissions for a fictional client.

Her approach builds meaning into the children’s study, is focused on developing contextualised knowledge and understanding, as well as skills, and puts purposeful learning at the centre of the planning process.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/some-problems-with-topic-planning/feed/2Using dramatic imagination to develop writinghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/using-dramatic-imagination-to-develop-writing/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/using-dramatic-imagination-to-develop-writing/#commentsMon, 17 Feb 2014 16:08:22 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1228I don’t know about you, but I find teaching children creative writing to be one of the most difficult, yet most rewarding, teaching tasks I do. For the first half of my teaching career I have to confess it was, on the whole, a hit and miss process. Mostly miss to begin with, then, gradually, more hit, as I slowly developed an understanding and appreciation of what it was I was trying to do.

For me, the biggest turning point came when I heard about the six forms of dramatic imagination – sound/silence; movement/stillness; darkness/light. Forgive me if this old news to you, but when I was first introduced to it, I was, frankly, thunderstruck: “Why didn’t I know about this?” I asked, “Why wasn’t I taught this on my PGCE? Why wasn’t I taught this at school?!?”

The six forms are such a simple, even basic, element of writing – indeed all art and art forms – that they should really be common knowledge in the same way primary colours are.

I learnt about them on a course with Luke Abbott, along with a group of other teachers, and we immediately incorporated them into our classroom practice. I use them all the time when I’m teaching creative writing, with all ages of primary children, from Reception to Year 6.

With the younger ones they can be used implicitly, through story-telling, drama, music, and art. By Year 2 (possibly Year 1) they can be taught explicitly so children can recognise them in writing and art, and start to incorporate them into their own work. I know teachers who put them up as a list on the wall, alongside other writing aids, and build them into their success criteria and marking feedback.

I’ve often used this opening extract from the Iron Man by Ted Hughes to introduce students to how the six forms work. I give them the extract, along with a marker pen, and ask them to underline every example they can find of each form – sound/silence; movement/stillness; darkness/light. I then read it out loud and ask them to put their hand up when they hear one. It doesn’t usually take long for them to get the idea.

The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff.

How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where had he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows.

Taller than a house, the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, on the very brink, in the darkness.

The wind sang through his iron fingers. His great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but as big as a bedroom, slowly turned to the right, slowly turned to the left. His iron ears turned, this way, that way. He was hearing the sea. His eyes, like headlamps, glowed white, then red, then infra-red, searching the sea. Never before had the Iron Man seen the sea.

He swayed in the strong wind that pressed against his back. He swayed forward, on the brink of the high cliff.

And his right foot, his enormous iron right foot, lifted – up, out, into space, and the Iron Man stepped forward, off the cliff into nothingness.

CRRRAAAASSSSSSSH!

Down the cliff the Iron Man came toppling, head over heels.

CRASH!

CRASH!

CRASH!

From rock to rock, snag to snag, tumbling slowly. And as he crashed and crashed and crashed

His iron legs fell off.

His iron arms broke off, and the hands broke off the arms.

His great iron ears fell off and his eyes fell out.

His great iron head fell off.

All the separate pieces tumbled, scattered, crashing, bumping, clanging, down on to the rocky beach far below.

A few rocks tumbled with him.

Then

Silence.

Only the sound of the sea, chewing away at the edge of the rocky beach, where the bits and pieces of the Iron Man lay scattered far and wide, silent and unmoving.

Only one of the iron hands, lying beside an old sand-logged washed-up seaman’s boot, waved its fingers for a minute, like a crab on its back. Then it lay still.

While the stars went on wheeling through the sky and the wind went on tugging at the grass on the cliff-top and the sea went on boiling and booming.

Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen.

Night passed.

I also like to use paintings for the same purpose. This is one I’ve used with Year 2.

Grace Darling.

My plan follows these steps:

I ask the students to look at the picture and see what they notice (I want them to look carefully, not to interpret). I’ll point out the life-boat if they miss it.

I ask them to imagine the sounds in the picture and to put them into a sentence with the following opening: “As the ship sank I could hear…” I write down their contributions.

I ask them to imagine the movement in the picture and do the same.

And the light. (For this picture, sound, movement, and light are the easiest of the six forms).

I then ask them to do the same for silence, stillness, and darkness. If they struggle I model it for them myself.

As we work in this way, over time, the students’ use of the six forms becomes more elaborate and sophisticated, and I ask them to start using them explicitly in their writing.

We have found, as the children’s skills and understanding of writing improve, they begin to use the six forms as an integrated part of their writing. In the same way they use other elements of writing, grammar, metaphor etc.

Here are some examples from a class of Years 5 & 6, writing a report to Parliament, as a team of mine inspectors in 1842.
(Note 1: I’ve used first draft examples to show how the students’ writing was before they had feedback or started to edit)
(Note 2: sorry for the quality of the reproduction of the students’ writing this was the best quality I could get using WordPress).

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/using-dramatic-imagination-to-develop-writing/feed/3Scheherazade – Early Islamic civilisationhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/scheherazade-early-islamic-civilisation/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/scheherazade-early-islamic-civilisation/#commentsFri, 14 Feb 2014 10:33:55 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1219Author: Tim TaylorTheme: Early Islamic civilisationAge Range: KS2Main Curriculum Focus: HistoryInquiry Question: How did Baghdad become the centre of Islamic Culture after AD 768?Expert Team: Story finders/researchers/creatorsClient: ScheherazadeCommission(s): To do research the Great Library of Baghdad for Scheherazade searching for new stories to tell the King every night.

Context:

This planning unit is aimed at upper Key Stage 2. It can be used to teach the non-European society study: early Islamic civilisation c. AD 900, from the new history curriculum, as well as create opportunities for cross-curricular links to other subjects.

It uses the story of Scheherazade, and the tales of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, to create a context where the students work as researchers and writers helping Scheherazade to find new stories to tell the king and keep her alive.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/scheherazade-early-islamic-civilisation/feed/2Planning for engaging students in the curriculumhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/planning-for-engaging-students-in-the-curriculum/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/planning-for-engaging-students-in-the-curriculum/#commentsSat, 01 Feb 2014 22:33:44 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1213One way to think of the curriculum is as a map of a country only partly explored. There are aspects – the coastline, a mountain range, some major rivers – that are well known to previous explorers, but there are others, too – the dark interior – that represent an unknown land waiting to be discovered. Of course, some parts of the new world we are told we have to visit, these are the mandatory places every traveller goes to, but there are others only we will find; places for us to explore and put on the map.

In this way we might think of the curriculum as something built in collaboration with a class over the year. Some parts are the prescribed objectives of skills, knowledge and understanding laid down by the National Curriculum. Others though emerge from the work we do as a learning community together in the classroom. For this reason it is important to plan for ambiguity, for openness and for opportunities for the children to contribute their ideas. The activities, questions, and challenges we plan for in advance are like the routes we take as we explore, but much of what we will find we can deliberately leave undecided.

Of course there is a danger in this approach that we will wonder off on a side path and get lost or forget to travel to those places on the map we are obliged to visit. This happened to a friend of mine who, when teaching Nelson with a year 1 class, found she had spent three weeks studying sharks. For this reason the first steps into a new learning context are the most important. It is essential to establish clearly from the beginning what it is we are exploring, for what purpose, and where we hope to end up. Many explorers have lost their way due to bad planning and preparation.

Here is an example from a unit of work for infants. The topic is animals; the mandatory curriculum centres on Key Stage 1 science, but the cross-curricular opportunities include reading, writing, speaking/listening, maths, geography, art and ICT.

In the planned imaginary context, the children work as a team of rangers running an animal park. The park is an ethical business; open to visitors, but with the welfare of the animals as its main priority. There is a wide range of animals at the park – many of them have been saved from poachers, rescued from badly run zoos or treated for injuries. The purpose of the park is to educate people about the animals, to treat them humanely and ultimately, if possible, to return them to the wild.

These are what might be called the ‘givens’, those features already on the map, which we will definitely visit, and some of the main routes and paths we will be taking along the way. When I plan, my purpose is only to decide in advance as much as I have to and to leave as many opportunities as I can for the children to ask questions and contribute ideas. As a principle, I think a child’s idea is always much better than my own, as long as we end up exploring the same curriculum.

So then, in the first steps into the animal park context the teacher asks the children what kind of animal they would like to look after, if they were people looking after animals in a park? This is an easy question for a class of young children. There usually follows a short conversation, something like:

“A rabbit.”

“Oh, do you have several rabbits you look after or just one?”

“Lots.”

“Um, are people who visit the park allowed to pet them?”

“Yes, as long as they are careful.”

“Of course. Does anyone look after a dangerous animal?

Several hands go up.

“I look after the lions.”

“Ok, are they together or kept apart? I know sometimes lions can fight.”

And so on. The questions are designed to steer the children’s thinking into the context. To help them understand what it is we are trying to develop together not ‘telling’ them: “Today we are going to build an animal park.” Generally teachers spend too much time telling kids what to do and not enough time listening to them. When asking these questions we are not looking for the right answers, we’re aiming to use them within the context we are building and trying to help extend the student’s thinking.

The priorities at this stage are to firmly establish what the context involves and to engage the children’s interests so they feel they have a contribution to make. As the context develops then the children can start making more of the decisions and contributing more of the ideas, which we can then use as the basis for further classroom activities. In this way the curriculum might be said to ‘emerge’ from the work, much like (to continue the metaphor) a new landscape might be said to emerge before a team of explorers.

The key thing here is to work (as much as the requirements of the mandatory curriculum allow) collaboratively with the children and, in this way, to develop and extend their knowledge, skills and understanding. This approach is called mantle of the expert or imaginative-inquiry, and involves using a combination of different teaching strategies – inquiry, drama for learning, as well as other forms of teaching – to create imaginary worlds for children to explore. These environments, like the animal park context, can work as a sort of evolving storyline, providing setting, narrative and tension to the children’s studies and making the curriculum more purposeful, meaningful and exciting.

Teachers use imaginative-inquiry and mantle of the expert in many different ways, some as a single lesson (perhaps at the end of the week), others as a year-long project incorporating large amounts of the curriculum. It is a flexible approach and has the advantage of drawing on the children’s imagination and energy. Often there is a great deal of detailed planning that has to be done in the beginning to make sure the context will do the job of teaching the curriculum, but once it is established most teachers find the process becomes much easier as ideas emerge from the work.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/02/planning-for-engaging-students-in-the-curriculum/feed/10We are hunters and gatherers of valueshttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/we-are-hunters-and-gatherers-of-values/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/we-are-hunters-and-gatherers-of-values/#commentsTue, 28 Jan 2014 11:01:31 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1211Dramatic play, early childhood pedagogy, and the formation of ethical identities.

Brian Edmiston- The Ohio State University

In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney (1995) recalls a dark hour in the history of sectarian violence in the North of Ireland when, in 1976, a minibus full of workers was stopped by a gang of marked men with guns in their hands and hatred in their hearts. The workers were forced to line up. A gun was waved in front of them as a man snarled, ‘Any Catholics among you step out here.’ The lone Catholic man in the group did not move when his hand was gripped by his fellow Protestant worker in a signal that said, ‘we are in hell, but we are here together.’ The story does not have a just ending. After hesitating, he stepped forward, only to see all his friends butchered. Yet Heaney finds hope in his belief that ‘the birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand.’ Heaney spoke of the need to recognize and sustain,

… the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness, in spite of the wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they too are an earnest of our veritable human being.

Having grown up, like Heaney, in the divided and often violent society of Northern Ireland, for decades I have been asking myself a moral question like the one he implies: how is it that people develop ‘the power to persuade themselves’ of the ‘rightness’ of their words and deeds despite the ‘wrongness’ that may tempt them to act otherwise? I have explored answers to this question especially as I have reflected on my playful parenting and pedagogy in early childhood classrooms that has dramatic play at its core. I have come to believe adults’ active participation in dramatic play with children, at home and in classrooms, can be highly significant in the formation of powerful morally persuasive identities.

ETHICAL ACTION AS ANSWERABILITY

Six-year old children are laughing as they pretend to be sharks using their arms like jaws to snap at me. We are in the meeting area of a suburban classroom in central Ohio having just analyzed photographs of sharks and dolphins to compare how these creatures swim, as well as what and how they eat. The children are noisy as they circle me while I pretend to be a series of swimmers. Children take turns pretending to be Great White sharks, telling me how to react, and narrating snippets of stories: some say I escape though most want to imagine that I’m frightened and then caught; some see blood and severed limbs in the water.

The children had previously invented, and in extended dramatic play they had run with their teacher, Trish Russell, the Extreme Adventures Travel Agency; they had enacting events from a ‘Swimming with Dolphins’ vacation that was ‘fun but safe’. Now we imagine ‘Scuba Adventures’, another travel company, taking people on trips where ‘others are afraid to go’. At first, the children like the idea of going ‘Swimming with Sharks’. After our pretend attacks we brainstorm protective gear and invent the story of Bruce Foster who, having left the steel cage and body armour we had imagined, was lucky to survive a shark attack. We pretend to fly him by helicopter to hospital where Trish meets us as his distraught mother. Days later, meeting me as the owner of closed-down Scuba Adventures, children are adamant that the agency cannot reopen until they are clear that no more clients will be in danger.

Rather than rely solely on the dominant moral developmental framework of Piaget and Kohlberg that views young children each at a pre-adult stage on their way to becoming less egocentric, more empathetic, and able to use more abstract, objective, rational, moral rules, I turn to the Russian theorist Bakhtin. In place of a universal approach to ethics, Bakhtin conceptualizes an ethical human being as embracing an ongoing discursive, or ‘dialogic’, struggle among ‘voices’ that are competing ideological guides to what is ‘right’ action in particular situations. Such a view can apply to people of all ages, including young children. What Bakhtin calls ‘answerability’ and ‘addressivity’ are central to his dialogic theory of ethical deeds. For Bakhtin, dialogue is more than an exchange of words. People are dialogic when they ‘answer’ voices that they experience as ‘addressing’ them; their answers are ethical when they evaluate, or assume, that one deed rather than another is the ‘right’ (or ‘wrong’) thing to do.

Like most of the children I enjoyed pretending to be an attacking, potentially deadly, shark. Being ‘addressed’ by a vulnerable swimmer I ‘answered’ with an attack. The ‘rightness’ of that act, for a shark, became clear to all the children in a subsequent discussion as we considered why predators kill. Similarly, the children were in agreement about how they ought to respond to Bruce Foster’s plight: all rescued him and many participated in running a hospital where he, and others in need of medical help, were cared despite many emergencies.

For Bakhtin, being ethical means that any person’s answer, and thus any understanding of what is right action, is never static, or ‘finalized’, but rather is always open to change in further dialogue in new situations. For example, whereas initially there had been little concern about vacation trips involving sharks, a developing understanding of safety was made clear as the children created drawings, stories, and models as many created the hospital and authored the story of Bruce Foster. Later, confronting me as the owner of Scuba Adventures many answered his complaint that he was losing money because he had been closed down, with a clear demand for a plan to keep clients’ safe.

All of this collaborative dramatic play occurred in a classroom where children repeatedly addressed other children: children wanted to share materials or space and desired to work together or sometimes be alone. Trish, as a teacher who wanted to build a collaborative community, was consistently ‘gathering’ children’s answers together into what they valued about their lives together in the classroom; these values were then addressed, discussed, and collaboratively agreed upon in class meetings. Dramatic play created spaces where specific questions and discourse about values like cooperation and safety could be ‘hunted’ for, considered, extended, and answered as they took action in very demanding particular contexts beyond the more predictable everyday contexts of schooling. For example, the need for people to collaborate in flying a helicopter or run a hospital and use medical equipment, like a blood transfusion drip represented by a drawing, or actual supplies, like bandages, were more pressing and obvious ways of addressing ongoing issues of sharing and answering in action than any classroom discussion about a need to share resources. And new understanding of the need to create and abide by rules in order to keep people safe was very apparent and obvious in the context of an imagined but very real person who had nearly died.

For Bakhtin, imagination is essential for ethical action. When a person uses what Bakhtin characterizes as the ‘dialogic imagination’, like the writers and readers of novels and other narratives, people imaginatively ‘project’ into the words and deeds of the consciousnesses of anyone whom they experience as addressing them. When we imagine ourselves as if we were other people we empathize because we view the world as they do. Additionally, imagination opens up the possibility of being addressed by those who are not actually present, adding more compelling voices and new viewpoints on actions to ‘mingle’ with, and affect, prior views.

Dramatic play can be an ethical portal into direct encounters with voices and viewpoints that would be sidelined or mostly silent in everyday life. As adults we develop the capacity to imagine conversations with other people and ideas without moving around as children often desire to do. For most adults, as Vygotsky put it, ‘imagination is play without action’ but for children ‘play is imagination in action’.

Bakhtin’s conceptualization of an ethical dialogic struggle to answer competing imagined voices that address us about right action, was apparent one day when our son Michael was thirteen. One Saturday, the day after a Friday evening school skiing trip, Michael showed me a $20 bill that he had found on the ground near his bus. He said he didn’t know whether to keep it or not having told me the story of where he had found it. I didn’t tell Michael what to do but rather I raised some questions for him including what he would want someone to do if they found money he had dropped. I spoke from the perspective of a person who had lost money as I pretended to put a hand in my pocket and realize the money was gone. He didn’t tell me what he would do, but on the Monday Michael gave the bill to the teacher who had been in charge of the trip. As no one had told her that they had lost money she returned it to Michael at the end of the day.

In a subsequent conversation a week later Michael told me about his experience of what had been for him both an internal and an external ethical struggle. He was responding to the multiple voices by which he felt addressed that included mine even before he spoke with me.

I thought maybe I shouldn’t have told you because at first I was thinking I could have kept it without my conscience being tested. But I was glad because if I hadn’t told you I would probably have had an inner battle with my conscience over the weekend. Over the weekend I’d have been thinking should I turn it in or keep it. Personally, I think I would have decided to turn it in.

I asked Michael if what I had said had made him turn in the money. He responded, ‘No. But it sort of speeded up the process and made me realize I should turn it in sooner.’ Michael had experienced an inner struggle between competing inner and outer voices. He told me that when I had initially asked him what he thought he should do, and why, he was pulled in different directions.

Other students had found money and kept it without turning it in

Someone had lost the money

It was impossible to know for certain who had dropped it

He had money in his hand that he could spend.

As I had talked with him he said it was as if I had ‘amplified’ all of these voices. In particular, I had created a personal voice for the person who had lost the money. That voice had become more demanding than the decontextualized voice of ‘finders keepers’ and the dominant voices of his peers who had previously kept lost money. Finally, I had focused him on the Golden Rule question of what he would want someone else to do if he had lost the money.

Michael’s actions were ethical, not because he had developed the ability to understand and follow an abstract principle like the golden rule, but because he had chosen an action in response to a struggle over how best to act when projecting into and answering all of the voices that he felt addressed him in both actual and imagined social interactions.

AUTHORING ETHICAL IDENTITIES

Bakhtin’s relational view of consciousness provides a dynamic view of an evolving ‘authoring’ self that acts in everyday and imagined dialogue with other people. An ethical self, for Bakhtin, is the acting consciousness that embraces a struggle to answer, not only those voices present in face-to-face dialogue but also those that may be sought out in encounters with others or that address us in imagination. If the self acts and answers in a conscious moment, then how a person’s consciousness extends to include social, cultural, and historical relationships with other people creates ‘identities’.

In their everyday and imaginative interactions over time and through their participation in social and cultural practices people continually author identities: people identify with the ongoing and past social actions and cultural practices of different groups of people. As Hall puts it, people form ‘points of identification and attachment’ with different cultural groups. Identities are formed in classrooms and families as much as they are, for example, within sporting, ethnic, or national groups. And, I argue, the ‘pretend identities’ taken on by children participating with others in dramatic play, at home or in school, can affect their everyday identities.

Especially because of my experience growing up in a sectarian society, I argue that though they overlap, people should not conflate ethical identities with socio-cultural identities; people’s views of right social action should not be predetermined by the moral discourse or viewpoints of any groups with which they identify. Further, what has become clear to me over the years is that at the heart of my ethical identity is an authoring desire both to understand the viewpoints of others rather than silence them as well as being open to change my own position in any response.

For Bakhtin, discourse is more than verbal exchange between people but rather includes the ideology of the inner voices in a person’s changing consciousness that underlie and guide their deeds. As Morson & Emerson put it, ‘Consciousness takes shape, and never stops taking shape, as a process of interaction among authoritative and innerly persuasive discourses’. Every interaction is not only a face-to-face discourse but is also an exchange that both affects, and is affected by, a person’s prior discourses. In contrast with Michael’s dialogic exchange in which he showed his openness to listen and reconsider his position, the gunmen in Heaney’s story had an uncompromising monologic encounter in which their rigid consciousness was unaffected by the lives of those they treated as intensely other than them: dialogue was something that they were unable to do with deadly consequences for those they annihilated.

If Michael had returned the $20 bill because I had told him to do so, or because he was following a rule or a family practice, he would have only been responding to, and acting from, an externally authoritative, or largely monologic, discourse. However, Michael’s analysis of his struggle illuminated how his discourse about how to respond to found money was ‘innerly persuasive’: he dialogically convinced himself about how he ought to act and in doing so was authoring and extending his consciousness. This was so despite the fact that his interaction with me was clearly influential. As he noted, I had ‘amplified’ some voices. As his father, my discourse tended to have more authority than the discourse of, for example, a schoolmate on the bus. And in imagination by giving voice to the viewpoint of the person who had dropped the bill, that I felt he had not fully considered, I was also alluding to a powerfully authoritative discourse: the Golden Rule. His action on that day was one incident in his ongoing gathering of values that have been tested, extended, and developed over time as discourses of his ethical identity. To what extent a person’s discourses are innerly persuasive or externally authoritative is apparent in their dispositions: how much, on the one hand, are they are open to dialogue or, on the other hand, how much they are closed to new ideas. Put another way, people are coauthoring selves and identities when they remain open to being affected by other people’s new ideas.

Though Bakhtin never wrote about education or learning, his conceptualization of discourse and inner voices parallels Vygotsky’s social constructivist educational theory: inner speech and abstract ideas develop from the interactions of external social speech. According to Vygotsky, mental concepts, that would include evaluations of what constitutes right and wrong action, must first be constructed in social interactions for them to become internalized. Bakhtin’s idea that authoring requires more than acting in response to externally authoritative discourse resembles Behaviorist assumptions about the need for adult control of moral action that underlie, for example, the Character Education movement. In contrast, both Vygotsky and Bakhtin stress that people only really understand when they socially construct, or coauthor, meaning. Meaning-making can include any shared ethical understanding or discourse that is shaped by, and in subsequent interactions shapes, an ethical identity.

COAUTHORING ETHICAL IDENTITIES IN DRAMATIC PLAY

My experience of play in schools has unavoidably been largely sporadic, even when I have been able to participate for extended periods of time, as was the case with bi-weekly visits over a year to Trish Russell’s classroom. In contrast, for over five years between the time when Michael was two and seven years old, I played with him regularly, and for extended periods of time. Our time playing together diminished as Michael became more interested in being alone with friends and more immersed in reading literature. However, especially when he was younger, dramatic playing was a dimension of our daily life at mealtimes, in the car, and at home, as we pretended to enter the narrative of a book or video.

Playing with selves and identities

Dramatic playing with narratives allows people to try out different ‘possible selves’ and over time author different possible identities. Michael took charge of our play. He could pretend to be any person or creature in the world of any story he liked and, moving seamlessly from one encounter to the next, he would invariably ask me to encounter him. Each imagined world became, as the Bakhtinian scholar Carl Emerson puts it in reference to adults’ reading of novels, ‘a test site for moral behavior’.

Though Michael engaged in some domestic or everyday play e.g. pretending to cook or use the telephone, he was more captivated by what I call mythic play. As Warner puts it, myths are ‘stories that inquire into everyday realities, projected unto an eternal and supernatural horizon’. Doniger adds that myths are ‘are about the human experiences we all share – birth, love, hate, death’.

In Trish Russell’s classroom the everyday medical and travel agency play was closer to the sort of pro-social ‘rehearsals for life’ that Erikson championed. At the same time, shark attacks and the fantastic medical symptoms children invented provided a mythic dimension that many children, especially boys relished experiencing.

Some of the mythic landscapes where Michael eagerly and repeatedly encountered the power of love and hate and questions of life and death included the following: Peter Rabbit; Jack and the Beanstalk; Perseus and Medusa; St George and the Dragon; Beauty and the Beast; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Star Wars; Frankenstein and the Wolfman; and Dracula.

Michael, pretending to be different possible selves (e.g. a knight, a Jedi warrior, or a human) would evaluate deeds as wrong when he commanded giants, dragons, vampires, werewolves, or people (all represented by me) to cease their monstrous deeds: attacking, killing, hurting, and not stopping when confronted. At other times he pretended to be monsters on his own or as he encountered me. As we revisited and broadly repeated the same narratives sometimes Michael most often wanted me to be one character e.g. when he had to sit still in the car he was often the Beast about to die with me, as Beauty, telling him how I loved him and what we would do if he did not die. When we could move around, Michael most often wanted us to switch back-and-forth between positions, in what I came to call positioning-play; sometimes within seconds or across days he could experience the same encounters from different perspectives. For example, he loved to be a terrorizing dragon, the heroic knight, St George, and the lady, Una, who nurtures George back to health. I was repeatedly put by Michael in a position of evaluating whatever actions he pretended to do e.g. as the knight I would try to stop the dragon using my words or my deeds if attacked me. Using Wenger’s distinction, I argue that over time Michael authored a positive identification with all those deeds, that in our discourse we evaluated as ‘good’ or ‘right’ (e.g. saving people, stopping killing, tricking attackers, talking monsters into not killing, reaching win-win solutions, being kind, nurturing victims), and a negative identification with those hateful or hurtful deeds, that we evaluated as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’.

Self-control

Bodrova & Leong have empirically shown what Vygotsky theorized: extended play develops children’s self-control. Shifting between the positions of the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders of violent or other hateful acts not only develops children’s capacity for moral action but also for restraint.

Michael’s developing self-control was very apparent once when I would not allow Michael, aged four, to do something. He was so annoyed that he was shaking as he said, ‘I feel like hitting you.’ When he added, ‘Shall I cut your head off?’ I responded by saying, ‘You could, but you won’t will you?’ He was transfixed. I helped him diffuse his anger by redirecting it into a narrative where he could use a sword for good ends. ‘Quick, if we don’t stop the dragon it will attack the people’. Michael soon was pretending to wield a sword, moving as if he was a knight in pursuit of me as the dragon.

Michael’s revealed his ability to control his self by answering inner voices of restraint when he was six-and-a-half. After school he regularly went to the family of his school friend, Ben. One day I discovered that Ben had punched Michael in the stomach in an argument over which television program to watch. I asked if he’d punched back. He replied with a tone that implied that he would never considering doing that: ‘Dad, I know what it feels like.’ When I asked if he had wanted to hurt Ben he responded, ‘Part of me does but I just say firmly, No, I don’t like this.’

Dialogizing discourses in position-play

Though he reenacted some episodes from stories with little variation, Michael mostly transformed narratives to create new encounters that, using Bakhtin’s term, repeatedly ‘dialogized’ a prior discourse. In other words, an ethical evaluation from one episode that I had stated or had implied, was placed in dialogue with another evaluation so that a more nuanced answer could be tested out. This occurred both across and within narratives. For example, whereas for Michael (aged just four) Medusa always turned people to stone but would not attack if left alone, a few months later he wanted to explore how the terrorizing dragon who confronted St George could sometimes be convinced to use his power for good e.g. to burn trash. At other times as the dragon he would not stop and with a discourse of warning and then regret I would use my sword to kill the dragon. Michael would repeat the encounter with him as the knight.

Aged 4 ½ he loved to pretend to take a potion to transform from Dr Jekyll into his shadow side, Mr Hyde. Michael positioned me to answer the deeds of Hyde whom he did not want to transform into a person who would stop.

Michael – You’re Mr. Hyde and I’m Dr. Jekyll. We’re the same person.

[In quick succession he imagines he is a werewolf who tries to attack Mr. Hyde/me, a little boy asking me/Hyde for money, and an adult sitting in front of Hyde/me. Michael tells me/Hyde to push him out of the way. As the werewolf he tries to wrestle me. As the boy and the adult he falls over.]

Brian/Hyde – Get out of my way.

Michael – Now I’m Mr. Hyde and you’re a person.

Michael/Hyde – Get out of my way [pretending to push me and repeating the words I’ve just said as Hyde]

Brian/person 1 – Please help me.

Michael/Hyde – Get out of my way. I’m a monster.

Michael – You’re another person who helps him [i.e. the victim].

Brian/person 2 – Can you help me?

[He changes to imagine he is my wife and we talk about what to do. He tells me to phone the police. He imagines we are police officers and wants to write in a book what has happened. He wants us to look for Hyde and imagines that we go into a house. He looks up and points.]

Michael/police officer – It’s Mr. Hyde. Come on. Shoot. Shoot

Brian – Wait a minute. You have to be very careful it’s the right person.

Michael/police officer – Yea. Come on. Shoot.

Brian – Wait a minute. You have to be very careful it’s the right person.

Michael/police officer – Oh dear. It’s him his claws (inaudible).

Brian – Shall we have it that he’s up on the roof tops and you …

Michael – and I (inaudible) yes

[He changes to pretend to be Dr. Jekyll.]

I resisted shooting Hyde, in contrast to killing a dragon, because I regarded him as a human. In the ten minutes between the first and second extracts, Michael turns from Jekyll back into Hyde and positioning me as a series of victims he attacks and leaves one for dead. Then we return to a similar encounter as the previous one as Michael dialogizes my earlier answer by placing me in the position of a man who had killed who refuses to surrender.

Michael – Now I’m the little boy. OK, daddy?

Brian – OK.

Michael/boy – Police. There’s a monster who’s killed some people.

Brian/police officer – Yea we know. Have you seen him? Do you know where he is? We’ve been looking for him.

Michael/boy – Yea. He tried to kill me.

Brian/police officer – Are you all right?

Michael/boy – Yea.

[He tells the police officer/me that Hyde is on the roof of a building]

Michael/police officer – Just no talk about it. Now get down or I’ll shoot you.

Brian – How do you want it to end? Do you want to shoot him or do you want him to come down?

Michael – I want to shoot you.

Brian/Hyde – No [laughing]. I can get away, I’m too clever for you.

[Michael shoots and I pretend to die]

Michael – Now change back into the Shadow.

[I lie down and transform my body into Hyde’s. Michael stands over me pretending to hold the gun. His mother, Pat, enters the room]

Pat – Are you going to use that gun to shoot other people?

Michael/police officer – I only use my gun to shoot monsters [said with a tone of this being obvious].

In a subsequent conversation with Michael, his ethical disposition was clear, one that through our play I too had come to accept:

‘Would you kill all monsters?’

‘Oh no, only those that have done many, many, many mean things …. killing people mostly’

‘And what would you do before deciding you had to kill it?’

‘I’d teach it to stop doing those mean things.’

CONCLUSION

When adults regularly play with children in worlds of imagination their moral explorations of difficult, dangerous, and often deadly encounters can significantly affect the development of ethical identities that are apparent in children’s dispositions toward others. Playing with children makes us partners in the moral task of developing a power to persuade oneself of the rightness of acting well despite the choice to act otherwise. Vygotsky stresses the connection between play and future action: ‘a child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality’.

When Michael was fourteen, I asked if he remembered times in daily life when he had acted, or thought about acting, to help others. This question came after a decade of him imagining, via dramatic play and reading, countless people in problematic situations more demanding than anything Michael likely encountered in everyday life. Two of the examples he gave illustrated his ethical disposition to identify with, and help, others in need: ‘I do ‘random acts of kindness’ helping people with their homework; whenever I see someone obviously struggling with something that I can help them with I always go and try to help them.’ A further example illustrated the prosaic struggle of answerability he was aware of even when he wanted to do the right thing:

When kids are making fun of another kid, you have to imagine from the point of view of the person who’s being horrible and you feel sorry for the person who’s being ridiculed. If you intervene and you stick up for them sometimes you don’t because you’re afraid others will laugh at you.

In Trish Russell’s classroom she recognized how playing with children throughout the year had affected students’ social and ethical identities. When I asked her why she valued playing with her students she was emphatic: ‘Not only do you teach them how to be creative, but also how to be real people and to feel like they’re going to be somebody in the world’. Extended collaborative play promoted more kindness in daily collaborative relationships among children; laughing at others, for example, was not tolerated. In particular, one boy, Ansel, who had begun the year isolated and angry with a highly oppositional identity, had ended the year more settled, happier, and more open to reaching out to work with others. Through dramatic play he had been able to explore different possible selves and identify differently with his classmates as he participated over extended periods of time in playful classroom social practices: as a bus driver, as a gatherer of other people’s opinions, as a creator of images for whole class use, as a sharer of information with others from books, and as a person fielding class questions. Some of the other children, who had ignored or rejected Ansel at the beginning of the year, by the close of the year chose to play and work with him.

Bakhtin believes that ‘ethics is a matter not of knowledge, but of wisdom’. Like Bakhtin, the novelist Ursula Le Guin understands that entering worlds of literature can promote the growth of wisdom in children. Adults who play with children can do more. By entering into imagined worlds alongside children adults can extend and deepen their own as well as the children’s ethical identifications when they too encounter people faced with ethical challenges and choices.

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.”

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/scheherazade-teaching-early-islamic-civilisation/feed/0Moving on the Knowledge v Skills debatehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/moving-on-the-knowledge-v-skills-debate/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/moving-on-the-knowledge-v-skills-debate/#commentsThu, 16 Jan 2014 20:38:20 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1190The great Knowledge v Skills debate rages on with no sign of it running out of energy: Every week there is a new blog redefining or reiterating the arguments from one side or the other.

From my own standpoint, when I first started reading education blogs about a year ago, I found the heat of the argument confusing. Why was the debate so contentious? Why was everyone so agitated? For me, both knowledge and skills are important – two sides of the same coin – and I found it a very odd idea they could be separated or one given priority over the other.

Nevertheless, when I wrote comments or tweets expressing this opinion, I was told the dichotomy is very real and causing untold harm to the education of students all over the country and I should be worried. So, I was, and I’ve tried to keep my mind open as much as I can, and I’ve diligently read every blog I’ve seen on the subject: trying to make sense of why so many bloggers find it important to keep fighting the same battles, over and over again.

In the process my views have not changed much – I’m still of the opinion both knowledge and skills are important and need to be taught and developed throughout education from nursery to university. And that learning of all kinds is best developed in meaningful and engaging (knowledge-rich) contexts – but I have begun to understand a little more of the reasons why each side is so passionate about their side of the argument and why they refuse to concede.

A change of mind

Recently I read a blog on the subject by Chris Hildrew, which I thought perfectly captured why the subject is so shrouded in antipathy and confusion. Chris, a self-confessed former ‘skill-phile’ wrote about how he has recently converted to the other side of the dichotomy as a born-again ‘knowledg-lyte’.

No blind follower of fashion, Chris has been careful to justify his change of mind by using the kind of precise language that has been notably absent from the KvS debate: “I have had a slow epiphany (if such a thing it possible). I have realised that skills are a type of knowledge – that in teaching skills we are teaching “know-how”.

Chris was writing in response to David Didau: “Procedural knowledge (knowledge of how to do things, or ‘skills’) is also important but is meaningless without propositional knowledge to apply it to.”

I was interested that David and Chris were making such a clear distinction and this started me thinking. Perhaps one of the main reasons why the debate is so polarized and difficult to resolve is because of a lack of clarity in meaning. In my experience, the precise use and meaning of words is all important when arguing over complex ideas. Many heated disagreements are generated because people are either arguing over the same thing, but calling it a different name, or arguing over different things, and calling them the same name. Could this be true of the KvS debate? Was the renaming of skills as procedural knowledge a real difference or just a rebrand? And what is ‘procedural knowledge’? If we have found it so difficult to pin down what skills are and how they can be taught, why should it be different if we start calling them procedural knowledge? Or perhaps procedural knowledge is something completely different to skills and this is the start of a significantly new direction?

Some nuance

Whatever the answers, it seemed to me things could be made much clearer than they are.

- Propositional knowledge “encompasses knowledge about a wide range of matters: scientific knowledge, geographical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, and knowledge about any field of study whatever.” [Ref.]

- Procedural knowledge “is knowledge exercised in the performance of some task. The procedural knowledge we use to solve problems differs from the propositional knowledge we possesses about problem solving because this knowledge is formed by doing. [ref.]

After reading this, it seems to me we should be very careful, when we are talking about knowledge, to make the distinction between Propositional and Proceduralknowledge, since they are two very different things. In just about all the KvS arguments I read in blogs, knowledge is considered a single easily understandable term, synonymous with information or facts, which everyone is assumed to understand and agree with. However, knowledge-as-truth is very far from being an uncontested term and knowledge-as-process can be divided into at least two very different sub-divisions.

A new direction

So, where does this leave us?

In one sense the argument has become more complicated with the addition of several new technical terms. We are no longer talking of a simple battle between knowledge and skills. We are now talking about a redefinition of all skills as procedural knowledge, in which case is the new battle between propositional and procedural knowledge? Or, are we saying procedural knowledge is different from what we call ‘skills’ and the new battle is between teaching propositional + procedural knowledge in opposition to teaching skills?

As clear as mud!

To my mind, anything that gives more precision to the language is helpful and moves the argument on. Therefore, I propose we embrace the more technical terms and develop a new line of inquiry: what do we mean by Procedural knowledge? Is it the same as skills? And, how do we teach it/develop it in our classrooms?

This seems to me a much more productive field of debate.

Asking questions

To start with, I would like to know a lot more about Procedural knowledge. What it means technically and how it develops in human beings. I have a friend, Geoff James, who I talk to about these things. He lives in Thailand (so we talk via skype), but until recently he was a teacher working for the children’s psychology services. Geoff is a trained scientist and studied epistemology and ontology (the philosophy of being) while researching his PhD, so he’s good person to ask about subjects like this.

Last week in a blog on epistemology, he wrote: “unlike information, [Procedural]knowledge isn’t stored in the brain somehow as relatively fixed material, it’s created in a specific situation. It’s never recreated in the same way again or used in the same way to produce action.” [Ref.] This puzzled me when I first read it, so I’m using this blog to ask him what he meant by it.

I’m doing a lot a reading at the moment, including the comments on your own piece. It seems to me there’s general confusion about the language relating to this question. I’m interested in working towards shared understanding as a starting point. This isn’t n exercise in navel gazing or trying to get famous by offending some people and attracting others. Words have meaning and if we’re going to communicate meaningfully I think it worth putting some effort into this phase of the work. Once we’ve got that…….

The single term ‘knowledge’ is used to describe many different things. The confusion this causes is evident when people are doing their level best to be understood and use ‘knowledge’ to mean;

1) a discrete bit of information – that the elements are arranged in logical order in the periodic table created by Mendeleev

2) discrete bits of information that can be communicated – the names and position of the elements in the first three columns of the periodic table

3) a skilled performance which is produced automatically and repeatedly and can produce communication about itself – writing down in correct order the names of the elements in the first three columns of the periodic table

4) a skill of performance which is produced within a particular context, is unique, is unrepeatable and uncommunicable – singing Tom Lehrer’s song ‘The Elements’ in an end of term concert.

In the language of cognitive psychology (not my first scientific language, I’m a biologist) 1 and 2 are called Declarative Knowledge. 3 and 4 are called Procedural Knowledge. Declaritive Knowledge is also known as Propositional and Descriptive Knowledge. I and 2 relate to discrete items of information, stored in memory and available for recall in the same form as hey went in. For example, I can tell you that free, equal, numerous, spiral, hypogynous (FENSH) is the characteristic arrangement of floral parts of primitive flowers. I learnt this knowledge (declarative) in 1970. It’s raw information, I haven’t processed it in any way and I can recall it in the same form as it went in, a mnemonic and it’s full version. Yesterday I rewired a 5 metre extension lead to make a short extension for more power outlets in our house. I’d tried using the original with its long lead wrapped up but it overheated badly. My tools were a pair of secateurs and a Phillips screwdriver. I assumed that I’d find it had screwed terminals as it would have done in the UK. When I looked it was soldered and there’s no earth connection here. I had to buy a new terminal block and it took me 20 minutes to finish the job. This was procedural knowledge. If you ask me how I did it, to give you a detailed description of the inside process, I can’t tell you. I just thought about it and did it. It works ok.

So at one and the same time, we are talking about knowledge as data, information, automatic routine, process, conscious performance, as being communicable and incommunicable, as permanent and transitory. That’s one reason we’re stuck.

My suggestion is to use the terms ‘know-how’ for context related, transitory knowledge, appearing when someone does something skilful, which is admittedly hard to assess; and ‘know-what’ for permanent, unprocessed, information, which informs and enables all ‘knowhow’ to appear and is readily assessable and communicated.

A long answer to a short question – or to put that another way… there’s as much information in the question as in the answer.

Thanks Geoff

In my reply to Harry @webofsubstance below I speculate there is a further distinction between generic skills and thinking processes. That generic skills are transferable across knowledge domains and are learnt through a series of different activities (often over a long time period) of deliberate practice, until we become ‘skilled’ enough to use unconsciously.

Whereas a thinking process is the combination of different skills and Propositional knowledge (developed in the past to a greater or lesser level of expertise) that are brought together in our minds to solve a problem which might be one we have not encountered before.

What do you think of this distinction and where does it fit into the four elements of knowledge model you describe above?

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/moving-on-the-knowledge-v-skills-debate/feed/25Make-believe is not the same as lyinghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/make-believe-is-not-the-same-as-lying/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/make-believe-is-not-the-same-as-lying/#commentsSun, 12 Jan 2014 18:51:48 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1180Why do primary school teachers lie to their students?

Some clarification

In answer to this question we first have to ask what we mean by a lie. In the Chambers dictionary a lie is defined as:

an intentionally false statement: they hint rather than tell outright lies | the whole thing is a pack of lies.

used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression: all their married life she had been living a lie.

My reading of this is that lying involves an intention to deceive for unscrupulous reasons. For me, the motivation is all-important when we are talking about adults ‘lying’ to children. If adults lie to children to deceive them for unscrupulous reasons, then this is reprehensible and has no place in a classroom (or anywhere else). However, if adults create an imaginary scenario or context for or with the children, with the primary intention of developing their learning, then the motivation is principled and it should not be called lying. I prefer the term make-believe.

A serious allegation

The accusation that adults lie to children every time they tell them an untruth is one lacking nuance and sophistication. It implies teachers who use imaginary situations in their classrooms are acting in an unprincipled way, deceiving their students, without their agreement or understanding and against their best interests.

Non-malevolent lying or make-believe comes in many forms along a continuum: From blatant fabrication, to subtle ambiguity. All involve the creation of an imaginary situation presented or co-constructed by the minds of those participating. This simple diagram illustrates the process.

– Everything happens in the real world.
– An imaginary situation or context is created.
– The participants are required to suspend their disbelief.
– Everyone participating is aware that the imaginary situation is unreal.

Make-believe as play

In its most straight-forward form this is how children play:

– Two children in the playground agree to play Star Wars.
– One represents Darth Vader, the other Obi-Wan. They each grasp a stick representing a light-sabre and begin to fight, making the noise of whooshing blades.
– For a few minutes they forget the real-world of the playground (which, nevertheless, does not go away) and are immersed in the imaginary world.
– One child cracks the other on the knuckles with her stick. The game stops immediately as the accident interrupts the imaginary situation and makes both children suddenly aware of the real world. “I’m sorry”, she says. The other rubs his knuckles.

“Its OK”, he says and raises his stick/light-sabre as a sign for the imaginary situation to begin again.

In this example, both participants are making the fiction and participating, moving into, out of, and back into the imaginary situation, as they chose or need to.

Make-believe as drama

In drama, the emphasis is put on making meaning. As the actors participate in the fiction, it is done with the intention of conveying narrative, tension, and point of view. In the theatre, in the cinema, on the television, or on the radio, those in the audience are viewing the imaginary world from the outside, in the real world. They are not invited in (unless on special occasions like pantomime, which plays fast and lose with conventions) and have no say over what happens ‘on the stage’.

Further, there is a tacit understanding between the audience and the actors that this is make-believe. Although in theatres and cinemas the lights are lowered in the house to push the real world into the background and help the audience suspend their disbelief, there is no message before the show begins explaining that what is about to happen is not real. The human mind seems quite capable of understanding that when Hamlet stands alone on the stage during a soliloquy, he is simultaneously voicing his thoughts in the imaginary world and talking to us in the real world. There is no need for someone to whisper this to us as he begins.

Make-believe as real-life made drama

The exception to this is when real-life is dramatised, as in a film like Argo. In these cases the film-makers are obliged to make an attempt at conveying the truth and reminding the audience that the film is based on real-life events. Some film-makers do this more successfully than others.

Occasionally, as in the famous Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio adaptation, actors and directors confuse their audiences by making their drama sound so real that are deceived into believing it is. This is not usually much appreciated and can cause anger.

Make-believe as simulation

In simulations, the imaginary world is made for others to participate in. In effect, the audience are invited up onto the stage to take part in a drama that has been created on their behalf. Most simulations allow the participants some say in how things develop, but their agency and freedom to act are very restricted. Narrative computer games fall into this category, although some are becoming very sophisticated. Some, have a narrative thread, that also allows a great deal of autonomy.

In schools, simulations are sometimes created by adults for the children to participate in ‘immersive’ experiences, such as a WW2 air-raid. They are also sometimes used by museums and visitors centres.

Simulations can sometimes be confusing for people if it is unclear to them where the boundary lies between the real-world and the imaginary-world. For this reason care must be taken to explain to them before the simulation begins that it is not real and any people they might encounter are only actors

Make-believe as drama-for-learning

In make-believe as drama-for-learning everyone involved is participating, both in the creation of the imaginary situation and in what happens when the fiction begins. This does not mean that those participating have complete freedom and license to take the fiction in any direction they choose. In drama-for-learning the curriculum-learning requirements are always at the forefront and those participating are aware that they involved in an imaginary context with the purpose of developing their learning. For this reason it is paramount that the teacher plans carefully the non-negotiable elements before they begin.

In drama-for-learning there is no attempt to deceive or confuse those participating into believing that the fiction they are creating is real. Indeed, the teacher may need to make this explicit from the very beginning so that all the children are completely aware – especially if they are working with very young children.

This is easily done and does not in any way spoil the situation for the children. Some adults worry that if the children don’t think it is real they won’t enjoy it as much, or the drama will lack some of the ‘magic’. This is not true and drama where the children are confused about whether it is real or not-real is not consensual and can not be classed as drama-for-learning. In drama-for-learning the imaginary situation is always made explicit, the children are always aware they are in a story, and that they or anyone else can stop the story at any time. In this way drama-for-learning is very close to play. The difference is that learning is the central concern of drama-for-learning and the adult is mediating and supporting the students the whole time in this direction.

Make-believe ‘as-real’ for children’s entertainment

I’ve left the most controversial of my list of make-believe scenarios until the end. This is because adults can be very sensitive about the stories they invent for children. The big two are of course Farther Christmas and fairies.

In both these cases, for most families, children are told these stories as if they are real. I, like most people, grew up believing in Father Christmas. I was less interested in fairies, but Joe 90 and Thunderbirds seemed pretty real when I was four. It was not until I was nine or ten that I put the pieces together and plucked up the courage to ask my dad to confirm my suspicions about the man who came down our chimney. He asked me if I was sure I wanted to know. I said, I did. He confirmed the truth. I was gutted.

This is a common enough story and never did me in any harm. Was it a lie? Well, it was certainly a deception, but it was done without malice and for my entertainment. I don’t blame my parents, they were being kind, and when I had children, Claire and I told them the Christmas myth too. They still enjoy it, even though only Ettie still believes (and she has her doubts).

But, does this kind of deceptive make-believe have a place in the classroom? I would argue, no. Father Christmas and fairies are stories are told to children as-real not to educate them, but to entertain them. The imaginary situations we create for and with children in the classroom must be of a different kind, they must be explicitly fictional, and used with the intention of developing learning. Children must be aware, from the beginning, that they are involved into an imaginary situation and given as much opportunity to influence and develop the situation as possible. The real-world of the classroom should not be confused with the imaginary-world of the context, however much those participating suspend their disbelief, because the purpose of all situations (real or imaginary) that we invent in school must have learning as their central concern.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/make-believe-is-not-the-same-as-lying/feed/6Dweck – Mindset in 60 Tweetshttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/dweck-mindset-in-60-tweets/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/dweck-mindset-in-60-tweets/#commentsTue, 07 Jan 2014 20:46:54 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1177These are my TweetNotes for Mindset. I’m planning to write a blog about it next week: Too busy at the moment.

#mindset 2.6 “people have to decide what kinds of relationships they want: ones that bolster their egos or ones that challenge them to grow?”

#mindset 2.7 “I’ll never forget the first time I heard myself say,’This is hard. this is fun.’ That’s the moment I knew I was changing Mindsets.”

#mindset 5.5 There is a strong message in our society about how to boost children’s self-esteem: protect them from failure! This can be harmful in the long run.

#mindset 5.6 ch need honest & constructive feedback. If ch are protected from it they won’t learn well. They will think feedback is negative & undermining.

#mindset 5.7 feedback is not helpful if it is full of judgement. Constructive and is helping to fix something, build a better product, will do a better job.

#mindset 5.8 Children with fixed mindsets say they get constant messages of judgement from adults.

#mindset 5.9 when children misbehave is it an occasion for judgement of their character or an occasion for teaching?

#mindset 6.0 “Don’t judge. Teach. It’s a learning process.”

#mindset 6.1 Many adults think when they judge & punish ch they are teaching. They are teaching ch if they go against their adult rules/

#mindset 6.2 …values they will be judged and punished. But they are not teaching ch how to think through the issues and come to ethical, mature decisions on their own.

#mindset 6.3 And not teaching children that the channels of communication are open.

#mindset 6.4 It’s not that adults should indulge and coddle ch, not at all. We should set high standards, but teach children how to reach them.

#mindset 6.5 Next time you’re in a position to discipline, ask yourself, what is the message I’m sending here…

#mindset 6.6 ‘I will judge and punish you? Or I will help you think and learn?’

#mindset 6.7 Simply raising standards in our schools, without giving students the means of reaching them, is a recipe for disaster…

#mindset 6.8 It just pushes the poorly prepared or poorly motivated students into failure and out of school.

#mindset 6.9 The great teachers believe in the growth of the intellect and talent, and they are fascinated with the process of learning.

#mindset 6.10 Do teachers have to love all of their students? No, but they have to care about every single one.

#mindset 6.11 Stereotypes tell teachers which groups to give up on before they’ve even met them.

#mindset 6.12 We must teach student to love learning. To learn and think for themselves. To work hard on the fundamentals. There are no shortcuts.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2014/01/dweck-mindset-in-60-tweets/feed/0Role play: from the ridiculous to the sublimehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/role-play-from-the-ridiculous-to-the-sublime/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/role-play-from-the-ridiculous-to-the-sublime/#commentsFri, 13 Dec 2013 19:52:53 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1171I don’t like the term role-play. I’ve not liked it since I was asked, as part of a group of PGCE students, to ‘fly’ around the hall pretending to be snow-flakes to the sound of Aled Jones singing, Walking in the Air. I felt a right nob.

This hatred of role-play intensified later in the year, when, as part of an Inset day, I was asked to role-play being a bully, picking on another adult role-playing being the victim. It was excruciating, the two of us play-acting our roles in front of a room of a friends and colleagues. When I had finished and went to sit down, those in the audience avoided my eyes, they were as embarrassed as I was.

I was ready to call time on anything that even hinted at drama. I believed firmly it was nothing more than a form of excruciating torture: an agonizing embarrassment of stomach-churning humiliation, with no other purpose than giving extroverts the opportunity to show off and piss about.

My views changed entirely the first time I was involved in something that was genuine and real: authentic drama, not pretending or role-playing. Luke Abbott, a former student of Dorothy Heathcote’s, was working with my class of Year 2s. Within a few minutes of starting the children, in-role as an emergency rescue team, were discussing what equipment they going to need to rescue people trapped in a giant sink-hole. They were talking about ropes and winches, helicopters and ambulances, night-vision goggles and remote controlled cameras, all without a hint of irony or embarrassment. Luke soon had me involved as an accident victim stuck in the hole, under a pile of rubble, unable to move and badly injured. The rescue team could only talk to me through their remote controlled robot:

“Can you move?” They asked.
“No,” I replied, “There is something heavy across my legs. I can’t see what it is in the dark. Can you help me? I’m scared.”
“Do not worry,” they replied, “We will be with you soon. Hold on. We are going to send you some water and a torch. Are you bleeding at all?”

I remember sitting there in the corner of the classroom, talking to my hard to engage class, everyone one of whom was crouching with Luke in rapt concentration. Totally focused on this gripping scenario, totally immersed in their roles as the rescue team. It gripped me too. For the first time I was enjoying drama. I wasn’t being asked to pretend to be injured, screaming in agony and writhing on the carpet, nor was I embarrassed by trying to act my part. All I was being asked to do was represent someone who was trapped, injured, and unable to move: Someone who needed rescuing. Any acting on my part would have distracted the children and taken away from them the mantle of expertise that Luke was so carefully building.

This was an important moment for me. I realised that drama could be an incredibly effective way to teach, but only if it was done well. All my previous experiences of drama had been dire, but now I realised they weren’t ‘real’ drama, in the sense of being authentic experiences, but silly, frivolous, play-acting activities. No one, before this session with Luke, had ever bothered to ‘protect me into’ the drama. Previously it had always been a jarring, awkward, jump from sitting on a chair, to ‘warming up’ with a game, to pretending to be a bereaved father or something. Luke worked in a different way with my class and I. He built a context first and then ‘inducted’ us into the experience, a little at a time, at our own pace. I don’t remember any feelings of embarrassment or any sense that we were pretending or acting, just a gentle, seamless, series of small, coherent, activities that ended with me on the carpet, holding my leg, and the children at the other end of the room, talking to me through imaginary walkie-talkies.

I don’t call this role-play, although some might. I call it drama. For me, the focus in role-play is stepping into someone shoes and pretending to be them; a very difficult thing to do well, even for trained actors. In drama, you imagine yourself, in that situation. You have a different point of view, you may imagine having a different set of values, certainly the things happening to you will be different, but you are essentially yourself. Heathcote borrowed from Goffman by calling this framing: essentially, we are always framing and reframing the world and ourselves in relation to it. As adult/teachers we are different at home to how we are in class, we are different in staff-meetings than we are in the pub. We are still ourselves, but the relationship we have to the situation is different. This is what drama-for-learning attempts to create in the classroom; different worlds, different situations, different contexts, and different points of view for the students to explore and learn from.

Not something to be dismissed lightly.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/role-play-from-the-ridiculous-to-the-sublime/feed/1Hirsch and the importance of dialoguehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/hirsch-and-the-importance-of-dialogue/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/hirsch-and-the-importance-of-dialogue/#commentsMon, 09 Dec 2013 10:35:41 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1163In answer to @webofsubstance: The Pedagogy of Serfdom

We must remember, in The Knowledge Deficit, Hirsch is talking about primary education. He understands explicit instruction will be of only limited benefit after a short while – he suggested 40 minutes a day – and only for the teaching, learning and practice of specific ‘skills’ – the acquisition, application and development of reading and writing. We must presume he would also advocate the teaching of maths ‘skills’ in the same way, certainly the vast majority of primary school teachers would and do.

The reason for this is two-fold. First, he understands young children will not concentrate on the delivery of explicit information beyond a certain amount of time (this might have something to do with cognitive load, I’m not an expert and he doesn’t mention it) and so after 40 minutes or so, depending on the age of the children, it is time to move on. Second, Hirsch is very clear that learning code, that is reading and writing, is very different from learning language. He refers to Steven Pinker and describes language as an instinct, something which human minds have evolved to develop through use, not receive through instruction. Language must be taught differently he says, through its ‘implicit’ use. Pedagogically this means students must spend much of the rest of the day using and hearing language – developing vocabulary and use – through activities that promote language, including drama and dialogue. Hirsch is not an advocate of passive learning, he wants children speaking, as well as listening. As does Willingham. Otherwise children will not learn to use language in the sophisticated forms enjoyed by the privileged. There are no short cuts to this, education – as advocated by Hirsch – must be language rich, both the language of the teacher and the language of the students. People who argue Hirsch is arguing for less student talk and less active learning are misrepresenting his ideas.

I’ll also mention something about knowledge. I’m not going to argue that knowledge is important, you argue that eloquently and we are on the same side on this matter. However, both Hirsch and Willingham, as well as auguring that knowledge acquisition is a dialogic processes, also argue, that knowledge acquisition is best learnt through the use of story-telling. They maintain, stories are ancient methods of making meaning and forming connections between existing and new information. They create contexts that people can remember and, then use, to retrieve knowledge which would otherwise be disparate and unremarkable. We remember huge amounts of facts about the Beatles and the cultural world they inhabited because their lives, songs, and images create a rich web of memories for us. For younger people this web is much thinner and much weaker. If we try to hang new information on it, it is likely to break and the information will be lost. Hirsch and Willingham understand this, and they both advocate weaving meaningful and engaging contexts with children, to create stronger and more resilient webs – for them.

I read both The Knowledge Deficit and Why Don’t Children Like School on your recommendation, both are excellent and I learnt much. But, I think we must be careful not to cherry-pick their arguments and use only those bits that suit us. Pedagogically they are a challenge. Both books make a compelling argument for why our current system of schooling doesn’t work. They then go on to recommend new directions for reforming and improving practice. I believe it does them both a disservice if we only highlight those parts of their pedagogy we agree with and ignore those that are less appealing. The knowledge v skills debate it still wheezing along like an old dog and many are ready to put it out of its misery. I say, let’s give it a rest (a nice cozy basket to cuddle up in) and let’s have a new debate, one inspired by Hirsch and Willingham, one about student talk and why the development of language is built on dialogue – speaking and listening, questioning and answering – and not on the delivery of information from one place to another.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/hirsch-and-the-importance-of-dialogue/feed/8A lesson on marking from Lilly, aged 7http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/a-lesson-on-marking-from-lilly-aged-7/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/a-lesson-on-marking-from-lilly-aged-7/#commentsFri, 06 Dec 2013 14:46:10 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1161When my daughter, Lilly, was seven, she brought home from school a pencil drawing of the two-faced god, Janus. She didn’t show me or her mum, but put the picture on a table in the front-room where I found it later that night.

When I saw it, I asked her why she hadn’t shown it to us. She said she didn’t think much of it. This didn’t sound right, the picture was beautiful and she had clearly spent a lot of time and care on it. I looked at it again. In the bottom right hand corner was a tick and a stamp that said: “Good work”. I covered them up with my thumb.

“What do you think now?” I said.

“I like it, I think its the best picture I’ve ever drawn.” She replied.

I took my thumb away,

“And now?”

“Its OK… just, ‘good’.”

I started thinking about my own class.

“What do you think of your teachers writing on your work?” I asked.

“I don’t mind, if its not my best work, but this is my best work and it is better than ‘good’.” She answered.

“What about if your teacher had written her feedback on a post-it?” I asked.

“That would have been better.” She agreed.

“And what about if she didn’t tell you if she thought it was good or bad, but just gave you some advice on how to make it better?”

Lilly thought about this for a while, “I’d like that.” She said.

Later we covered up the unwanted marks with Tippex and Lilly put the picture up on the wall in her bedroom.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/a-lesson-on-marking-from-lilly-aged-7/feed/6Marking 2: Some principles for effective markinghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/marking-2-some-principles-for-effective-marking/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/marking-2-some-principles-for-effective-marking/#commentsThu, 05 Dec 2013 16:50:28 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1150In this blog, I want to look at some of the principles underpinning effective marking from the schools I’ve visited and the education blogs I’ve read. The following represents my current thinking on the subject. It is not a definitive list, neither would I call myself an expert. However, from what I understand, the principles on this list should constitute a firm foundation for developing a sound school policy on marking: One that will benefit the students and satisfy the inspectors when they call.

If I’ve made any mistakes or missed out anything important, please let me know. I consider this document a work in progress and very far from the final word. Here’s my list:

1. Be clear about the purpose of your marking

One of the main points of confusion (well it certainly confuses me) is what exactly we mean by the term, ’marking’. The dictionary definition: ‘a line, figure or symbol made as an indication or record of something’ (Chambers) isn’t much help. And the etymology is very murky – if anyone knows what it is, can they please get in touch. For these reasons, we need to be careful when we use the term and we need to be even more careful when we hear it used by others – especially our cousins in the inspection service.

It seems to me, marking comes in different forms and serves different functions. It looks different in each case, and requires different strategies and resources to work.

Basically there are four kinds:
– Marking for accountability
-Marking for assessment
-Marking for planning
-Marking for supporting and developing student learning

I would define each of these categories in the following ways (please feel free to argue and disagree with my list):

Marking for accountability: This is essentially marking to demonstrate, to others, that the children’s work has been looked at by those responsible for their education. ‘Others’ might include, senior leaders, inspectors, parents and the students themselves.

Marking for assessment: This is marking to assess the development of the students’ learning – often called summative assessment. Although there is also some confusion over the terms, summative and formative, and a very heated academic debate still fumes over the difference, I’m not going to enter that territory and for the purposes of this blog I’m going to say ‘summative assessment’ does not include the student and ‘formative assessment’ always does (the ‘formative’ bit being the forming of the student’s learning).

Marking for planning: This is marking that informs the teacher, helping her to make an assessment of the students’ understanding and development and to use this information to plan ahead.

Marking to support and develop student learning: Often called ‘formative assessment’ or ‘assessment for learning’ this is carefully formulated feedback for students on their own work, giving information on how to improve, opportunity(s) for self-reflection, and further activities to develop their understanding.

It seems to me, the use of marking changes as children move through the primary phases. In Nursery and Reception most marking seems to be of the accountability and assessment kind (although there is a great deal of ‘modelling’ of writing for students, which I will look at in detail when we get to the blog on marking in Early Years). But, as the students move through KS1 and KS2 the emphasis shifts and marking, while still including a significant amount of marking for accountability and assessment, becomes a more dynamic process, involving the students themselves in a much more dialogic way. This is not to downgrade what happens in Early Years (far from it), but is, I think, a reflection of the children’s own developing skills and dispositions, particularly in reading and writing.

2. Effective marking includes detail and rarely needs praise

I am aware some might consider this a highly contentious statement and that many excellent educators will disagree with me fervently. However, I’m not saying, ‘don’t be nice to the kids’. Smiling, affirming, and genuine compliments are all allowed. In marking these can take many forms, including stamps and stickers, although I don’t use them myself. What I’m arguing against is the kind of senseless and useless platitudes that once littered my own marking: “Wow”, “Fab”’ “Brilliant work”. Frankly, who cares what I think? If I believe that saying, “Awesome” every time one of my students does any writing, what am I saying about them?

The principle I’m proposing is not about being dire and critical in our feedback, but about being honest and generous. Let’s not make the children dependent on our judgements, let’s help them to become self-analytical and self-motivated. The most important judgement, good or otherwise, is the student’s themselves. This is not to say, we shouldn’t be assessing the children’s work and making judgements about their development (this is the purpose of marking as assessment), but that the purpose of marking – as feedback – is to help the students develop their own capabilities and to become honest judges of their own work. We make it too easy, if we make the judgements for them.

3. Do your marking as quickly as possible

One of the most consistent messages I hear from teachers, both in schools and from blogs, is to get your marking done as soon as possible and back in the hands of the students, with a task for them to work on. As a child I went to a secondary modern school, the only marking our teachers did was ‘tick and cross’, I don’t remember learning anything that way. At University I got essays back marked with grades and comments, but usually weeks after they were handed in. I don’t blame my lecturers, I’m sure they were very busy, but I didn’t learn much that way either. The best feedback, by far, was when I did my PGCE. Our assignments were short, quickly marked, and followed by seminars where we discussed the content. There was dialogue, analysis, and feedback. Much of what we did was immediately applicable and relevant. As a result, I learnt more in those few months, than at any other time in my life.

In primary education, especially KS1, this is more important than ever. Time goes very quickly when you’re are six and the writing you did a week ago is from another age. Most of the teachers I spoke to in KS1, marked the children’s work the same day and started the first session of the next day with a lesson where the students where handed back their work and given the chance to analysis it themselves and work on a development activity.

This was more difficult in KS2, where the children produce work of greater length and sophistication, but the teachers still made every effort to have the work marked and back with the students as soon as possible.

This puts great pressure on teacher’s time and commitments outside school. Many of the teachers I spoke to said they stayed late every day, rather than take their marking home, and the ones that had young families said it was extremely difficult to get things in balance. This can obviously cause a great deal of stress and burn out. Therefore, it is essential that the workload is manageable.

4. Make marking manageable

I often think of teacher workload like one of those shove-penny games at beach arcades. As you drop a coin in at the back the coins are shifted backwards and forwards. Sometimes, they accommodate the new coin and nothing happens. Other times, the new coin pushes and shoves the old coins in such a way that the ones on the front topple and fall into the chute below.

Introducing a new initiative at school is like adding a new coin into the shove-penny machine. I don’t know a teacher who isn’t working at, or close to, full capacity. None of us are sitting around, twiddling our thumbs, wondering how to occupy our time. So, the first question we have to ask when introducing a new initiative is – where are we going to find the time? Effective marking is a huge commitment – a massive coin as it were – and asking teachers to start marking in the detailed and elaborate way I’m suggesting, will involve them in a significant re-structuring of their workload. Coins will inevitably fall off the front, and this needs managing.

There is little doubt, schools who want to develop effective and successful teaching and learning practice (as recognised by Ofsted), need to have a well-working and school-wide marking strategy. Further, if you are a school looking to improve, it seems one of the most important things you can do is introduce an effective marking approach. For more information on this visit Mary Myatt’s blog, written from the perspective of an Ofsted inspector.

However – if my shove-penny analogy has any meaning – the extra workload will have to be managed careful and some things will probably have to go. This is a major challenge to school-leaders and not an easy one to solve. As we all know, just saying something is a good idea and writing an action plan, doesn’t make it happen. Especially, if it involves a change in culture and work-practices.

One suggestion, is to look at what teachers are doing currently and freeing up some of their time by taking away a few of their commitments. In many schools this means employing extra pairs of hands. Another, is dropping some initiatives and ‘slimming-down’ what the school offers, especially after school. It is fair and reasonable to ask teachers to run after-school clubs, as well spend hours marking and preparing for lessons? These are difficult decisions, some involve the re-allocation of money, others a change in what schools can provide, but what is the alternative – a policy that never gets properly integrated, with frustrated and stressed, teachers and managers?

The most important thing is to keep an honest and frank dialogue going, where teachers can share their ideas, but also express their frustrations and concerns. Feedback is essential in my opinion. We need to be able to say if a new initiative isn’t working and if the extra time and commitment is ruining our lives. In my experience, big projects that involve the whole staff and mean a change in school practice, do not work unless everyone is committed and included. Mistakes will be made, changes will need to happen, and voices must be heard.

The next blog will look at marking in Nursery and Reception.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/marking-2-some-principles-for-effective-marking/feed/3Marking 1: Marking in a primary school settinghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/marking-1-marking-in-a-primary-school-setting/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/marking-1-marking-in-a-primary-school-setting/#commentsMon, 02 Dec 2013 19:02:49 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1146When I studied at University for my PGCE, in the early 1990s, we did not do a single workshop or seminar on marking. It just was not considered important enough, anyone could mark an exercise book, it was a simple task of putting ticks and crosses where appropriate. A process that had remained essentially unchanged since the end of the last century (or even before).

The only genuine innovation, over that time, was the introduction of excessive praise, which was designed to make children feel better about themselves and, thus, more likely to work harder. I applied this principle lavishly myself, and so my students’ books were full of happy faces, stickers, and platitudes, such as – Wow’, ‘Super Work’, and ‘Awesome’.

Even Ofsted were not really bothered with marking. In my first inspection they spent an hour, of a four day visit, giving a cursory look at a sample of books from the whole school. In my second, I’m not even sure they bothered to look at them at all. Marking was something teachers did to show that they had looked at the children’s work, no one thought a tick and smile made any difference to their learning, it was just a piece of administration and not really worth bothering with. Which is why I and many others resented doing it so much.

Everything is different now. Since the late ‘90s, a series of landmark research studies have transformed the status of marking into one of the very few undisputed areas of effective pedagogy. It has evolved through a process of practice, reflection and improvement, to become a refined, precision tool of significant quality and very few people would disagree now-a-days with the assertion that quality feedback plays a central role in developing successful and independent learners. Certainly not Ofsted, who now place great weight on the quality of teacher’s marking when they are evaluating the effectiveness of a school’s provision.

This blog, and the ones to follow, are a summary of different marking strategies and policies I’ve seen working effectively in a number of schools. I hope to demonstrate how teachers use marking for a number of different reasons and how the process, of marking, changes and adapts as children move through the primary phases, from nursery to year 6. Since September, I have been lucky enough to visit quite a few schools, in different catchment areas, across the country, teaching in nursery, reception, key stage 1 and key stage 2. I’ve talked to teachers, students, and school leaders about marking, how it can be used effectively to develop student learning, how it can provide valuable information for planning, and how it can be used to give helpful feedback for parents and others.

I’ve also read every blog I can find on the subject (of which there are many), you can find my list here. Everyone of them is an excellent example of what education blogging can do best – sharing practice across the community – and what is remarkable is the convergence of opinion on what people believe constitutes the best practice. I don’t intend to re-write what has already been explained so well, however, I have borrowed excessively and many of the strategies I mention will be familiar to those who have read them. David Didau’s blog was one of the first I came across and it is still, for me, the most straight-forward and complete explanation of manageable and effective marking I’ve read anywhere.

You will notice, however, that the vast majority of these blogs are from High School teachers working with older children who have developed competent reading and writing skills. Few look at marking in primary school settings and none at marking in nursery and reception, where very few children can read and write and the purpose of marking is, consequently, very different. This is not a criticism, merely an observation, and one of the many benefits, I find, of education blogging is how it allows sharing of practice and experiences across the great secondary/primary divide. Nevertheless, marking in a secondary setting is very different, from marking in primary, and marking in KS2 is very different from marking in KS1 and EYs. For these reasons, I have decided to focus on how the process of marking changes through the different primary phases as the students grow older and their reading, writing, and processing skills develop. In particular, how marking evolves from being essentially a process of recording, assessment and modelling into one of feedback, reflection and redrafting.

In the next blog, I am going to examine some of the principles for effective marking I’ve found mentioned consistently in the blogs I’ve read and the schools I’ve visited. These will constitute the foundations for a planned marking strategy that can be used across the primary age-range, to meet the different purposes and processes that adapt and evolve as the students move through the school and their knowledge and skills develop over time.

Then, I am going to look at marking for each phase in detail, firstly in Nursery and Reception, then in Key Stage 1, and lastly in Key Stage 2. I’m going to use examples of children’s work and teacher’s marking to illustrate my analysis and I will include strategies and resources that hopefully teachers, teaching assistants, and school leaders will find useful in their own settings. My main aims are to share some of the very great practice I’ve read about and seen recently, to open up a constructive dialogue, and to learn more. Please tell me of your own ideas, let me know if you disagree, and put me right if I’ve got something wrong. I am in no way an expert in this field and there are many who know a great deal more than me.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/12/marking-1-marking-in-a-primary-school-setting/feed/10Pedagogy for Peoplehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/pedagogy-for-people/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/pedagogy-for-people/#commentsFri, 29 Nov 2013 13:14:41 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1139It is now six months since @betsysalt made her impassioned plea in “What I wish teacher bloggers would write about more…” asking for more blogging on the practice of education, in context, with examples from actual practice, with actual children. Her disappointment was that the topics covered by teacher bloggers tended to concentrate on a narrow band of subjects and rarely offered real, tangible, ideas, recommendations and strategies from authentic experiences in the classroom.

Her blog asked for more honesty, more humility, and more sharing: “perhaps most of all, can we hear about your mistakes. We all know failure is a vital stage of learning…when did you fail? What did you learn?

So you fantastic teachers out there, yes you, you who inspire your class most days, make them laugh, keep them safe and engage them in that staggeringly complex process of learning…can we have less pedagogy and more people.

In fact, more children. What worked? What didn’t?

I’m all for learning, I’m all for developing practice. But can you put pedagogy in context please.”

Her blog ended with the wonderful slogan – “It’s not people v pedagogy. It’s pedagogy for people”

So, how much has changed? Has Betsy got what she wanted? Have we noticed a change in the kinds of blogs about education we read, or are they still from the same shallow pool, without examples of real classroom practice and on the same recurring subjects – Ofsted, lesson observations, SLTs?

To be honest, I’m bored reading about Ofsted and whether they have changed this month or not. I suspect some bloggers write about Ofsted almost obsessively because they know it generates more hits for their website. I’m not saying there isn’t a problem, there most surely is, but how many more times do we need to keep raking over the same old coals? We’ve all got Ofsted horror stories, do they need repeating over and over again?

It is the same with bad lesson observations and bad senior leaders. Everybody in education at some point has been on the wrong end of an unfair observation and bad managers exist in every walk of life. Again, I’m not downplaying their perniciousness or how horrible and undermining a bad observation or a bad manager can be, I’ve experienced both and resigned as a consequence, but do they need to play such a predominant role in the subjects covered in education blogs?

Let’s move on and take up the challenge Betsy made of us back in May, let’s write more blogs about real practice, let’s discuss our mistakes, let’s use examples from real classrooms, with real children. Let’s moan less and celebrate more. Let’s stop attacking the practice of others and the strategies they find work. Let’s respect each other as professionals and stop pretending there is a single (and unimpeachable) way of teaching. Most of all let’s be honest about the role of empirical evidence in education and stop using it as cudgel to attack ways of working we don’t like or understand.

Last week a group of teachers (me included) started a new re-blogging website called Primary Blogging, the aim of this site is to essentially collect, collate and disseminate blogs on primary education. It is no closed shop, it carries no ideological baggage, and is pushing no particular pedagogical approach. Inevitably a number of the re-blogs are about the old favourites of Ofsted, observations, and bad SLTs, but many of them are not. Although they might not get the hit rate of more controversial subjects, there are blogs about the role of TAs, autistic children, writing, the use of praise, and (most prominently) marking. The latter is because of the wonderful initiative, #blogsync which promotes a single topic of discussion on education each month. #blogsync is exactly the kind of project we should be developing for teacher blogging – it is respectful, professional and inclusive.

I hope, as more and more teacher bloggers begin to join the conversation, they will take the Betsy’s advice and follow #blogsync’s example and write more about the kinds of subjects that will move us on as a profession. Writing that focuses on real classroom practice, warts and all, without fear of being attacked, criticized or ridiculed by others. Many people say that Twitter and Blogging is the most valuable CPD they have ever had. That’s great news, but it can be so much better.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/pedagogy-for-people/feed/1Links to blogs on markinghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/links-to-blogs-on-marking/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/links-to-blogs-on-marking/#commentsWed, 27 Nov 2013 20:20:59 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1132About six weeks ago I started work on a blog for the October Blogsync “Marking with Impact”, I thought it would be a quick piece, maybe a few hours work. My focus was on marking for Early Years, Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. However, once I got started I soon realised what a complex web of different strategies, purposes, and outcomes the subject is. As a consequence my blog (or blogs) are going to be a horribly late entry.

Nevertheless, one advantage in being late is the opportunity it gives to read all the other blogs that have been published recently on the subject. They make up a fascinating and extremely useful list. Please let me know if I’ve missed any out.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/links-to-blogs-on-marking/feed/3Dorothy Heathcote – Four models for teaching & learninghttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/dorothy-heathcote-four-models-for-teaching-learning/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/dorothy-heathcote-four-models-for-teaching-learning/#commentsThu, 21 Nov 2013 13:49:03 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1128There has been some interest over the past week in the work of Dorothy Heathcote (1926 – 2011). Heathcote left a great deal of writing stored in the Heathcote Archive at Manchester Met University some of which is available on the mantle of the expert website.

Dorothy studied and wrote about drama in education for over sixty years and during that time her ideas changed and developed. She moved through various phases, creating and adapting new ideas as she went along. She described this work as a process of discovery and uncovering, and it has had a profound effect, both on drama for learning pedagogy and theatre practice. Her essay on the conventions of drama is considered of seminally importance in both fields.

The following essay was written by Heathcote in 2002 and is a good introduction to her ideas. It outlines four models of teaching and learning, Drama used to explore people; Mantle of the Expert; Rolling Role; and Commission Model. We have re-published it here for those who would like to understand a little more about her philosophy and pedagogy.

Dorothy Heathcote
Contexts for Active learning: Four models to forge links between schooling and society
Presented at the NATD conference, 2002

I am a slow learner. I tend to get sudden moments of illumination, which shed a light across my practice and join things up in a way I haven’t realised before. When that happens I’m annoyed that I didn’t know that previously. Perhaps we’re only allowed a limited number of “eurekas” to keep us humble I remember talking this over with Gavin. He seems to fly over the whole landscape of drama and learning while I tunnel along like a mole with sudden surfaces of enlightenment.

I had such a moment of realisation when I was considering what I had to say at the ‘Gradgrind’ conference in November last year which might be worth saying and worth the listening to. I thought at the time that I had invented a new paradigm for schooling but when I began to sort it for out for myself I had an even more revealing thought. Those two insights are the basis of this paper. For me, the second one is more illuminating than the new paradigm though that might be more important for active learning procedures in schools the future.

I realised that every single teaching strategy I’ve ever invented has been because I can’t bear to be in a position where I have to “tell people off’. If I reach that point I am breaking a deeply felt rule to do with power used to disadvantage. That seems rather high-minded and moralistic. What it means at bottom is that it isn’t based on collaboration. To get collaboration from classes, who really owe you no attention you haven’t won, needs subtle and honest strategies, which forge bonds rather than confrontation. So once I had seen my dependence on strategies I examined my “new” paradigm and realised it was only a natural development of everything else I’ve been doing for years.

I propose to examine four models of teacher/student activity using what I’ve always thought of as a drama approach, but in reality the base building block of all four models is that of agreeing to work through invented and agreed fiction. Fiction contains the word drama. It widens the possibilities for action and necessarily blurs the genre. This broader spectrum of action has earned much criticism because I didn’t – indeed wasn’t able -to explain my vision of fiction being more overarching than drama.

The first model will be very familiar. Drama used to explore people, their behaviour, their circumstances, their responses to events which affect them. The art form of theatre is, like play, a self-fulfilling activity it fulfils its own future by the actions of the makers So, at one level teachers and classes quite legitimately make theatre and use audiences.

But around this ‘pure’ form there have developed a network of other forms of exploring people and events invented by a variety of teachers to serve their own interests and beliefs. It’s a “shape shifter” and can accommodate itself to a variety of forms but certain elements must be present if it is to be linked with drama work.

1. It works through social collaboration

2. It will always involve exploration in immediate ‘now’ time where participants engage with events in the first person; I do. That’s the drama element.

3. It must involve participants considering one of the three levels of social politics. The psychology of individuals to drive the action, or the anthropological drives of the community, or the social politics of how power operates. These three form the lubrication and friction which makes the work have meaning for participants beyond the ordinary and mundane.

4. It will always require some modification of behaviour so that the fiction isn’t mixed up with the usual way people behave. It needs some selectivity, however limited.

5. The event must have focus, usually through productive tension, which has to be injected deliberately. In the early stages this is usually provided by the teacher, like the first stitch in a tapestry around which all the other elaboration will naturally develop.

At this level the teacher has to do the play “wrights” job -as maker collaborating with the nature of the material. I prefer the concept of “wrighting” because it performs its intention in collaboration with the readiness of the material to receive the stimulation. All craftspeople instinctively temper their incursions to the nature of the materials they work on: But what of the teacher and the social and academic nature of the class? This is the heart of the problem and reason for such a wide range of strategies and negotiation skills being needed.

The soul of the artist protects the wood or stone, and the teachers’ strategies must defend their class from feeling threatened, being stared at or exposed in negative ways. I always knew that this must be at all costs avoided and this is why I began to develop those strategies, which made some observers think that I spent most of a lesson in not getting started. In fact I knew that consensus and interest has to be won at distance from standing up behaving. Hence my drawings, or being in role, or deciding how a situation would be resolved but not the process and time of getting there. So my lessons even at this stage looked ‘back to front’, or static in so far as the children first moved in their heads but not off their bottoms immediately.

In hindsight I realise I was preparing the material to meet the productive tension. so that by the time they were intrigued nothing would fail them no matter how inexperienced they were. It was ages before I met and instantly recognised Bruner’s particularisation of iconic (get the picture); symbolic (shape it in familiar ways of writing and talking it through) before you embark on the expressive (do it now). The imperative of taking people through those stages caused my strategic vocabulary to grow. Hence my attention to “voices”, uses of paper, all the conventions developed to protect, and primarily my work in subtle kinds of role.

There was, however, one element which seems to have come from nowhere but which I used in my very first teaching encounter. I knew to develop a group point of view not cast children into parts as actors are organised. Considering that I had just completed a three-year Theatre course this is still a mystery to me but it took me forward.

To Model 2: Mantle of the Expert

I perversely insist on using this name because I cannot find a more precise way to express the full meaning of it. It carries two layers of meaning, precious to be preserved. ‘Expert means opportunity to work at knowledge and master the skills. ‘Mantle’ means I declare my calling and live up to what is expected of me in the community. It encompasses style attitude and dedication which takes time to build in fiction, as well as in the real world. As a teacher I want students to enjoy and find use in the curriculum but I believe it has to be embedded into caring about it and joining all the parts together. When formal schooling is left behind we draw on what we know about to “inform” our total existence.

Mantle of the Expert carries forward the elements of model one except that the common point of view is taken into task situations where a client in the head is involved, and it operates rather like the guilds of earlier times. A master oversees the work of apprentices, but everyone shares in the tasks which must be accomplished for the client. In my head I think of myself as a working “maister” responsible for providing, overseeing and maintaining the momentum of the work. Model one shifts the shape of the human explorations. This model shifts the shape of the episodes as the complexity of the enterprise and curriculum demands are brought into focus by the ‘maister’. This model is designed to be built around all curriculum study but is lifted from the drudgery of task enforcement by the control and power to serve the client, which is handed circumspectly and generously to the “apprentices”.

This is mainly endowed by the teacher’s language which, in the ‘maister’ role periods, uses restricted code. Two kinds of servicing this work are available to the teacher. When ‘Inside’ the ‘mantle’ the Maister regulates behaviour, offers information in restricted code, and builds belief in the ongoing tasks of the enterprise. Outside the mantle the teacher operates as helper towards the success of the enterprise. The task then helps everyone to “think about” some aspect. The teacher never uses the voice of the expert instructor. The form of the communication will be as ‘ helpful colleague, what Chris Lawence has called “enlightened witness” which exactly embodies what I have in mind.

An example of the two voices when negotiating the same situation could be useful here. This situation arose when Broadwood Junior School children were running a shoe factory and unemployment was affecting many workers in the north-east where they lived.

The maister’s ‘voice’: “I don’t like having to say this but you know people aren’t ordering handmade shoes like they used to. We’re going to have to think of other sorts of leather work… I wondered about Roman leather buckets for Vindolanda?…”

The teacher’s ‘voice': “You know when we did the shoe survey and saw how many shoes nowadays have man made soles and uppers. I wonder if we could think of other things our factory might make in leather so all the workers can be kept busy. We could tell the maister at the next meeting….”

I introduced mantle of the expert work when I was trying to help teachers who didn’t understand creating tension by being playwrights and to cut out the need of children having to act, or express feelings and behave “like other people”. It seemed easier to start from doing tasks, and all enterprises can begin with very unthreatening activity. For example, using Bruner’s three kinds of edging in and focussing. A name for the enterprise can be chosen, or a drawing of the place where everyone works, or a job which everyone would do together can be used so long as it doesn’t demand too much expertise. I recently started a Brewery Stables of 1836 by all of us deciding on the name of the horse we drove when delivering barrels. When the names were written and placed round the hall we could then all clean out the dirty straw. From that one task all the complexity of a working brewery could be launched, because we knew where “our” horses were.

Mantle of die expert fulfils a very important function very easily. That of developing the watcher in the head -the self-spectator. It achieves it because our enterprise includes our client, and considering this makes everyone aware of why these things have to be done. The client in the head in Mantle of the expert is akin to the artist’s position in working on is necessary but they examine the materials. They not only do what nature of the doing. In school it is the maister who invokes this for each individual as well as for the whole group as a community of workers. Community is essential in Mantle of the expert.

Mantle of the expert has strong links with play without children feeling “babyish”. In play a world is made by the will of the players who control that world and live in it as long as they are intrigued by it. This happens in the enterprise also. Everyone is “grown up” carrying the responsibilities of adults and facing up to the results of their decisions. A feature of this which has to be faced, and which can have repercussions when colleagues see it first in action, is that it appears to be a muddle with the teacher apparently having lost authority to shape the lesson. This is because, as in play, every child enters the first tasks at their own level of socialisation, imagination, and information. The teacher can readily diagnose the skivers, the copiers, the watchers, the leaders during the early stages, especially the “actors” who start inventing crisis at the drop of a hat. The maister’s voice has to regulate the latter. For example in the stable there was a run of lameness among the horses. “If you’re telling me you’ve neglected horse’s feet to this state I can ‘t believe the boss is still going to employ you -later on when we have to get them between the shafts. You’d better have another look…. ” -Hence my reputation ‘Bully Heathcote’.

This apparent chaos invites the question as to what is a ‘properly” organised lesson? Many years ago a head teacher said to me of a teacher who was on my advanced diploma course “I don’t care what he does, so long as he teaches Coriolanus quietly”. Obviously she knew what proper lessons look like, and there’s still a lot of it about. In Mantle of the Expert, imposed external organisation has to wait a little until they develop belief in their responsibility to the common enterprise. The 1836 stable took fifteen minutes before a full group of ethnically mixed top juniors started worrying about shortage of hay, and it was never lost, for children quickly feel the power of their position.

In model one the stable tasks would form the background to working out people’s lives in their work and “story”. Model two has no story for it is a built life style working its way forward into more and more complex cultural and society circumstances and situations which mould the community values, labours and world viewpoint. This is why curriculum work has purpose and application (and there are no dummy runs) where students practise skills and learn about things within the contextual needs.

To return to my own development. The drama model taught me a very large range of strategies which I justified because they won children to work, protected them from feeling stared at, and my taking part allowed them to gang up and develop a common point of view in developing the event. When it was necessary for an individual to represent an “other” we negotiated it using protective devices like the conventions I developed. The mantle of the expert model employed all these but in addition became a developing saga which by using episodic shifts could be manipulated to serve any curriculum work. Both these models fulfil my need as a teacher to create positive social communities outside schools.

Model 3: Rolling Role

I have called this model Rolling Role because the base work can roll from teacher to teacher and many classes can share in the common context. This seems particularly useful in high school where teachers are often subject-based and meet classes for relatively short periods of time on a weekly or two weekly basis. Teachers often feel isolated as they have a discrete area of curriculum responsibility. If there is a drama specialist they have to invent their curriculum and frequently are seen as teaching a ‘soft’ subject, however much they try to service other subject areas. So I invented rolling role to try to alleviate the isolation of subject teachers and help students carry the same context with them from lesson to lesson and see that subjects have links with each other. Sharing skills and information is paramount in the work for teachers and pupils alike.

Rolling Role can be used by one teacher working with all the timetabled classes s/he meets or by teams of teachers who want to feel they are in touch with the work of their team colleagues without disturbing their regular timetable too much. To do this the team must develop a common context which will provide a bank of work designed to meet the curriculum areas the team are individually responsible for. So every member of the team ensures that the bank will sustain what they need to draw out from it, to make contexts for their class work.

In rolling role participants explore different facets of a community. They are not members of the community but they have access over time to many aspects of how the community has been, is now, and they certainly wield power over how it may develop. So the team of teachers create a community in a place and with features they all agree will be mandatory for all of them when developing the affairs and concerns of the community. This model allows short as well as long lessons to be incorporated. Some times a very brief circumstance will be explored related with the subject area of the teacher. Work can be left incomplete so that another class takes it forward, or uses a product arising from one group and recycles it to serve another curriculum area.

A school in Birmingham organised a team from art, history and drama with English. They each had mandatory studies to teach that term. The history colleague was interested in some classes learning about Saxon culture, particularly the laws relating with social hierarchy. The teacher of art and technology was interested that term in some classes experimenting with pastiche painting and studying different period styles.

Technology ranged between three dimensional model making and computerised modelling. The drama teacher had a big drive towards helping children examine how people lived before consumerism dominated their lives, and to become involved in reading.

They devised the town of Leyford, existing since Saxon times, currently in receipt of a public gift. The town map they made showed the small Reeve Library housed in a cruck barn, a listed building. There was a (now disused) cinema in a central position and a Saxon Manor house and stables in private ownership at the edge of the map. The map presumes and informs that Leyford exists, has a history and that people still live there now. It has a future. They also devised specific artefacts and materials to serve their teaching goals. The history teacher made a ‘damaged’ manuscript which told of the memories of a citizen who in his youth had seen what we now call Haley’s comet. His memories incorporated detailed information regarding Saxon life, yet appeared to be a remarkable tale of a day when huntsmen discovered two green children and brought them into the manor and reared them.

This story of the hunt formed the basis of fragments of a fresco discovered on a wall of a manor house during renovations. Because the fresco painted by the art teacher was all in pieces (plaster of paris protected by brown paper backing) it would enable her students to study the style of the painting and the content and paint in all the missing parts just as restorers of frescoes do today. The pastiche element. The Reeve cruck barn housing the library was defined by a series of architects’ drawings so that the Saxon imprint carried throughout. The drama lessons would involve children in inventing shelving (a listed building) to house more books and to fill the shelves with “recent additions and acquisitions” and so invent story lines and build the classification system. These children were in the main reluctant readers who needed to feel important and take initiatives.

When the team have invented the context (in this case a town but it need not be such a large social structure) they must together decide upon a disturbance factor which will trigger changes for the modem citizens to deal with. This is akin to the playwright’s point of tension and the changes relate with curriculum study.

Leyford citizens were given a large gift from a grateful member of the town who had become rich and currently had a prominently successful career. S/he was a pop star born in Leyford and since much travelled but with relatives still living in the area following their usual life style. The star wished to build and endow a new larger library on the site of the derelict cinema and to buy the Saxon manor house and stables in order to develop it as a school for blind children (their special charity interest) and to make the stables house a school for guide dogs.

These changes, of library, guide dogs and school for the blind, were selected to serve quite specific ends: The blind school would require book tapes. This would involve students precising stories and reading them on tapes, which would then be reviewed by other classes.

The guide dogs provided animals to be cared for in unsentimental ways and would ‘invite’ the genuinely blind to visit and learn about the dogs and training. It provided animal interest for younger classes. The story tapes would be positively criticised by blind people who could also suggest other materials and tapes made with backing sounds or recorded in different locations.

In Rolling Role the drama element lies in building belief in the lives of the people and the events they are meeting in the current time. The mandatory evidence demands interrogation of various kinds depending upon the teachers’ choice of engagements with the town’s matters of concern. Teachers never use the drama word and certainly don’t introduce it as a drama project.

Leyford town started when a letter headed by the Cruck barn and logo “The Old Reeve Library” indicated “that they had been contacted by an ex-resident of Leyford, living now mainly in America who had a successful career in leading a pop group. The person wished to show their gratitude to Leyford their birthplace by endowing a new library etc etc” So exploring the map and its implications and finding the various locations was the work of the class needing to read, and lead, in the first decisions. This group discussed, decided on the feasibility and wrote an advertisement for the local paper to call all interested citizens to hear of the proposed gift and thoroughly examine the proposals. All classes received this missive at their normal lesson times, consulted the Leyford map, placed so that it was always available and so the town was launched. The curriculum opportunities are taken from this common pot of possibilities, everyone of the teaching partnership is free to select work around the central context.

However all work produced by classes is publicly open and available to stimulate other work. The outcome is massive. Some will be rough notes or sketches inviting re-cycling. Some will request more additions such as illustrations for text, or critical study needing a report. The frescoes and ancient text were introduced by the

teachers with a vested interest in the opportunities they provided for specific curriculum teaching but they also were used by many classes for different learning experiences that are immediately obvious. It will be seen that an area available to all the groups and the team has to be set aside for displaying and keeping catalogued all the mass of materials which develop.

Sadly it has been my experience that this collection viewed by colleagues is often seen as either showing off or, as one headmaster said to me in scathing tones “It looks more like an infant school”. He made no comment regarding the large number of children and a very few staff who regularly visited the site to see “how Leyford was getting on”. What a web site opportunity Rolling Role provides.

So Rolling Role becomes a soap opera of sorts as many people add to the complex developments which arise from servicing the story of Leyford. We now have an archive of the community -a kind of Domesday collection. The past, the present and the future are available for attention. The teachers narrowly focus each lesson (as does soap opera) and milks each opportunity as much as it is deemed necessary for the curriculum work. The children are as gods developing the culture of the town and the lives of the people they create. It will be drawn to a kind of conclusion when the team of teachers consider it to have served its purpose. The archive need not be thrown away -it can be collected and kept as Leyford’s Domesday, or help with teacher education!

You can see now the central thread which is consistent through all three models. It is social politics so easily introduced via systems where ‘people’ business is central. In the drama model I developed the strategies which bred common points of view and share impulse to resolve social events. In Mantle of the Expert, I created working communities with concern for others -clients in the mind. In Rolling Role I discovered the power of children to build a whole community though it need not necessarily be a town. It could be a commune, or Marks & Spencers’ Management team, or a Cathedral or Health centre -any group with aspirations facing change.

In Rolling Role though the children do not actually do the work of an enterprise. Like gods they oversee and decide how best to work things out on a variety of levels and the many varied aspects requiring attention. All classes will become familiar with some elements more than others. Only when they visit the displayed incremental and ever changing work can the whole picture be explored. The emphasis is on a socially maturing community. You can see now how my main teaching drives have never changed. To present children with ever increasing webs of information and skill within a framework of social and cultural awareness. You can see also that what I thought was a new paradigm, my fourth model, is only a continuum of the first question I ever asked a class: “If you were captain of a ship what qualities would you look for in choosing a crew?” the question is ill formed. I could certainly never ask it thus now. But it carries me like an arrow to my present teaching stance and my new paradigm for running a school.

Model 4: The Commission model

Until I discover a better term for it shall serve. It can involve a whole school, or, as with Rolling Role, only a proportion of children and staff may be involved. Then it would work like a school within a school. The commission model cannot accommodate as Rolling Role can to school timetabling.

It will work like this. The work of the staff and students will be that of responders to commissions sent to them from the community. The commissions will make precise demands and will have a built-in time structure so that on the commission being accepted an allowance of time and resources will be decided.

The work and the results of the commissions will always be brought to a publication which can vary according to the nature of the commission. This builds in standards and quality because the publication will be submitted to the original commissioners. The class work will be related with three teaching values which will be built in from the very start with all the participants. These are rigour, responsibility and realisation. The latter is very significant because it embodies a factor often missed out of schooling. Realising now what we have learned, can understand, and put to use in our lives, that previously we had not recognised. Publishing careful organised results provides the necessary casting off point of realisation.

The commission model carries the social element present in other models right out into the community beyond the school interests and environs. So there will be need for teachers actively to search out commissions and use their imaginations about institutions who might like to become involved. There are many instances of sponsors becoming involved in school work such as the Gateshead Domesday Book with which NatWest bank collaborated. I get the impression that as schooling and partnership becomes more and more debated in the media there is varied opportunity and a wide range of business interest in collaborating -if only at the lowest level of publicity!

Not all commissions need to be sought from outside the school, especially in the early stages. Teachers can invent commissions which are curriculum based and can be tempered to suit any group and time span suitable to their needs. A simple commission may be a request for a clippy mat, or collage, to be used by a nursery class. This would have to be introduced in a realistic believable way to a group of children who need measuring, designing vocabulary skills as well as opportunity to share and collaborate. Such a commission would entail a collection of old worn out clothing. Then the designs have to be prepared based upon who will use it and what is available from the fabrics as to colour, weight and texture. There will be the need of a rug frame -easily made, but lots of these are around still in the North East -and blunt wooden pushing tools. Then the choosing of canvas, marking out the design and sorting out working teams to cut and classify the different fabrics. There will be reports of progress to prepare and send, photographs to show progress from start to finish, and finally the completion and presentation of the mat (for story times) or collage to be mounted for use.

You don’t need a lot of imagination to see how this commission will yield curriculum work in number, measuring accurately, designing textures, designing, cutting with a minimum of waste the shaped garments that are likely to be contributed, talking about procedures, inventing stories about clippy mats and visiting places where they can be seen. This relatively limited commission format will be scaled up in complexity and definition of products which need not be tangible objects. Work demands which involve curriculum and time scales suitable for the commission to achieve the teacher’s intentions. And remember, a commission is NOT A PROJECT!

Imagine then a building in which commissions dictate groupings of staff, children and timetables, where spaces are booked for specific kinds of work needs and materials drawn with discrimination from the general supply. Staff, parents and children must be involved, especially in the early stages, in deciding precisely what terms like ‘commission’ and the three R’s mentioned previously shall mean in their school/community. Crash course in specific areas of knowledge will be essential (as they are in society at large) and these will be instigated when a commission requires it. Times can be also set aside for practice periods, such as when new information, or research or library skills or penmanship or whatever comes to the teacher’s mind are needed, but always linked with an upcoming commission or an interest triggered by a completed one.

It is important that the formal structure of timetable, peer group classes, allocation of staff to specific groupings is not all discarded at once. One High school I know of is consulting staff to see who might be interested to each try a commission first with their own class, to be decided upon consultation with their parents who may be involved but who certainly will be informed at every stage. These commission will need to be related with the skills and expertise of the teacher, but all the teachers taking part will be prepared to move around different commissions helping as best they can.

The three processes, of accepting a commission, accomplishing all stages of the work it requires and bringing it to a published useable conclusion must in my view be integrated into a teaching philosophy which is agreed upon by everyone concerned. Usually the philosophy is embedded in a mission statement to use modem jargon. And I do not mean the type of pamphlet now being produced by schools which make promises which frequently are not fulfilled in process. The mission statement must be mandatory and always incorporated in the work of each commission. For me I choose that “All work undertaken shall be in the spirit of stewardship not exploitation”. This statement encapsulates economy, service, respect, detachment of scrutiny and observation, care for quality and fitness for purpose. That would be my base line for all the work of all the people for all their commission days.

This way of working falls into what Fritzof Capra calls “the emergent design of human organisations”. Designed organisations become rule bound and difficult to change because they tend to form the establishment”. He offers a word of caution, useful when considering bringing changes to social organisations. “The two types of structure designed and emergent structures -are very different, and every organisation needs both kinds. Whereas designed structures cannot grow, emergent

structures are adaptable, develop and evolve. They are expressions of the community’s collective creativity… the challenge for any organisation is to find a creative balance between designed and emergent structures”.

He goes on to consider leadership which is of prime importance to teachers and teaching. “The organisation’s mission is generally the result of a design process. The traditional idea of a leader is that of a person who is able to formulate it well. The other kind of leadership would be the facilitation of emergence. This kind of leadership is not limited to a single individual but can be distributed. It consists in continually facilitating the emergence of new structures and the best of them into the organisation’s design.”

He suggests that emergence is facilitated “by creating a learning culture, by encouraging continual questioning and by rewarding innovation …. by creating conditions rather than giving directions”.

He could be commenting of OFSTED when he states that “organisations are still judged according to their design structures not according to their emergent structures” and, further that “one of die important implications of the new scientific understanding of life for the management of human organisations is that more attention should be paid to emergent structures and to the leadership that facilitates emergence”. There’s something in there that might be considered in planning teacher education.

A recent example of an emergent structure happened on Tyneside when a piece of derelict land was transformed when a head teacher out in her car “collecting up” children who should have been inside the school, saw the site as a possible play area where none existed. She consulted the unemployed people living around the school and together everybody started hauling out the detritus with which wind and fly by night dumpers had cluttered up the area. Then they tackled the dog dirt, the bits of glass and bags and finally consulted parents and the council at a school meeting, how the land could best be put to use. During the clearing period many youths without jobs began to “muck in” bringing their mates “for the heavy stuff’.

This area is now a children’s playground, and some low maintenance gardens with benches made with local gifts and contributions from gardeners plus a dog walking area and dog bins. It caused an interesting phenomena during a night of riotous protest about a youth killed when joyriding in a stolen car while being chased by the police. The youths stopped their vandalising when they reached the newly dedicated area, walked quietly through it, only resuming the calculated vandalism after they were clear of it!

There are many such examples about where someone sees a need and facilitates change based upon local ideas and energy. This makes me think a commissions model would be timely, provided all the participants are drawn in to collaborate. This means parents and children as well as teachers. As commissions reach out into community matters it will be necessary to involve many kinds of organisations designed or emergent.

This then incorporates what Capra calls ‘feedback loops’. “The feedback phenomenon is important for all living systems. Because of feedback, living networks can regulate and organise themselves. A human community, for example can learn from its mistakes, because their effects will travel and come back along those feedback loops. So the community can correct itself, regulate itself and ultimately organise itself. Because of feedback, a community has its own intelligence, its own learning capacity”. Further, he quotes Nildas Luhmann “who describes a human community as a network of conversations. The results of conversations give rise to further conversations which generate self amplifying loops. Thus an off-hand comment may be picked up and amplified by the network until it has a major consequence. The closure of the network within the boundaries of the community results “in a shared system of beliefs, explanations and values, which is continually sustained by further conversations”.

This statement by Nlklas Luhmann is supported by the Institute for Research on Learning in Palo Alto, California which came to the following conclusion. “The most powerful organisational learning and collective knowledge sharing grows through informal relationships and personal networks -via working conversations in communities of practice” (my italics).

This last comment is exactly borne out in the four models I am discussing. It is very obvious in mantle of the Expert and Rolling Role. And it becomes so in the conventional drama model when the teacher uses role whether by facilitating a guest role or working in/out of role herself. Also, each model I have suggested fulfils Capra’s philosophy of emergent organisations and feedback loops. Drama permits organisations to be inaugurated and teacher in role is a powerful feedback loop when subtlely and generously used with the children. I found it very useful to examine the words enterprise and enterprising. The Oxford word-finder lists thirty-nine definitions. I recommend it as a stimulus!

Now what about the staff and divisions of labour? So long as commissions remain “‘domestic”, invented by staff from within the school to serve specific necessary purposes related with the curriculum it need not require “delicate’ ventures involving people outside. Parents and all service staff will have been consulted anyway and usually are pleased to be involved as listeners, visiting roles -the sort of thing we are all familiar with. Certainly commissions work does not tolerate gawpers who pop in just to take a look. This applies in Mantle of the Expert and Rolling Role because the invented communities lose authenticity when gawpers arrive. No one can stop the world and get off. But I envisage commissions growing in complexity of knowledge, research and interaction, so someone has to take responsibility for facilitating community contacts and seeking out those who best can be usefully (and challengingly) involved. This means someone with status and authority, so here is a whole new job description for a head teacher. I envisage them working outside the school much of the time. Sometimes at the behest of busy staff to locate the kind of knowledge and advice (& resources!) a commission will require. But also in surveying and cataloguing the human and facility resources available and making unthreatening contacts, generally introducing the school to the community. And of course now with websites and e-mail …. someone can have a lot of interesting encounters.

Staff must pool and use all their talents and be completely honest about what they can’t do. Some teachers are excellent tutors and hopeless at giving lectures where people must be caught up by the speaker’s style so that content is made of absorbing interest. Commission work is no soft option or ‘go as you please model’, but then teaching through drama systems never was in spite of often being thought to be so. Teachers have to learn to build up group belief in the commissions especially in early invented’ ones. Later more complex commissions may be believable in the sense that they are real in relation to community matters. The dilemma here may lie in convincing a group that a current commission is really relevant to their lives as young people linking school work with their needs and interests. I have never found children to reject any Rolling Role community, and they will work to their limits to “get things right” once they care about the people whose lives they facilitate.

I have never possessed an area of knowledge I could call a subject so I have always operated in aspects of social politics and relied heavily upon the expertise of subject teachers or skilled workers in the community. Social politics, however, as any drama teacher knows makes positive entry to subject enquiry as it relates people to information. Thus gateways are made to a surprising range of interests and skills. But this gateway always incorporates the homely words our politicians, unfortunately so glibly say. Society, morals, work, family, concentration, courtesy, clear communication, imagination, standards, having initiative. These are the lubricants of society in forging productive social health.

A hot air balloon best illustrates for me a commission model: The basket supports the human energy which produce the power to sustain and guide the enterprise. It contains and limits but clearly defines the parameters of the enterprise. The strings supporting the basket to the canopy are the skills and knowledge and conviction which drive the process towards its conclusion.-These will be many and various strands which are carried upwards and collected in the canopy driving the work forward to its destination. But then I’m fanciful!

There are literally thousands of commissions waiting to be taken up so that schools and community become more and more and interdependent. I have this dream that if that could ever be possible children would not have to spend thirteen years of their lives being denied protected responsibility and without power to influence how they spend their time in school. Neither would they be expected to suddenly emerge at eighteen like Pallas Athena out of Zeus’s head, as mature responsible members of their community. Mantle of the Expert and Rolling Role work allow them to test their capacities as maturing human beings, and certainly to demonstrate their interests and abilities. A commissions school would make a seamless link between the two worlds of work and active participation in learning together.

So long as teachers come to school to teach pupils and pupils come “to be taught” the energies of both are deflected and neglected. Paradoxically if teachers can find a way of not needing pupils, to be taught, they will become doers and creators exploiting opportunities for their knowledge and skills to be needed and welcomed. Then Shaw’s insulting statement which has always offended me (and I fear has become one of the myths absorbed by our culture) that “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach” will at last go to the obscurity it deserves.

The perfect model I keep before me of a commission engaging students and staff, and serving the world community is the one in the science department of the school which tracked and identified the first Sputnik in space before even N.A.S.A. knew. Let that encourage us.

‘The story is known as “The Green Children” and is authenticated in two C 12 manuscripts (so it was a “gift” to the history teacher) chronicled by Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newbridge. Folk Tales & Fables of the World Barbara Hayes and Robert Ingpen. Published Dragon’s World Ltd. G.B. 1987 ” Quoting from his book The Web of Life -a New Synthesis of Mind and Matter Harper Collins 1996 and an article ‘Creativity in communities’ Resurgence No 186 Jan-Feb 1998 “‘ The Oxford Word Finder Readers Digest Oxford Edited Sam Tulloch 1993

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/dorothy-heathcote-four-models-for-teaching-learning/feed/1Answering some questions on mantle of the experthttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/reply-to-old-andrew/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/11/reply-to-old-andrew/#commentsSat, 16 Nov 2013 13:55:23 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1104On 14th November the anonymous blogger ‘Andrew Old’ made some spurious accusations on Twitter about mantle of the expert being the next Brain Gym and being ‘totally insane’. I tried to answer these allegations but Andrew strategically blocked my account and ignored my repeated offers to discuss his allegations. On Saturday 16th he wrote a blog where he accused teachers who use mantle of the expert of dodging the argument and refusing to answer his questions. Why Andrew did this remains a mystery. The following text is my reply to Andrew’s blog, I have re-published it here to record the conversation as I think readers might find some of the answers to his questions informative. You can find Andrew’s original blog by following this link.

“Thank you for your questions Andrew.

In reference to your argument on Twitter, I asked you three times if you would like to discuss the matter. On each occasion you ignored me. I would happily have discussed mantle of the expert with you and why it is not the new Brain Gym, however, you decided to stonewall me instead. That is unfortunate.

I’m sorry you don’t like the sound of mantle of the expert and find the claims laughable. We can’t do anything about that. If you had provided reasons other than “It is easy to find many other claims that are, on the face of it, laughable.” Then we could make a start.

I must remind you that we are not trying to convert anyone, we do not make exaggerated claims and respect teachers professional choice to use or ignore any strategy or approach they do find effective in their own classrooms. We would never press any teacher to use mantle of the expert, I hope that is clear. We have invited you repeatedly to come and share your practice with ours in a spirit of mutual professional dialogue, you have refused each time. This is also unfortunate. The offer is still there.

In answer your four questions:

1. “Why should students, particularly those who don’t like it, have to do lots of extra drama?” This is a little odd for you. Since when did you start arguing that students’ enjoyment of a strategy was a reliable measure of its efficacy? Have you had a change of heart? I would argue that no student should have to do a lot of extra drama if they don’t like it. My experience over twenty years, however, is that students do like exploring imaginary contexts, so long as they are adequately ‘protected’ into the experience. This is a very tricky part of the approach and something that is easy to get wrong. Many people have had bad experiences of drama at school (and on INSET days) and hate it as a consequence. I considered myself one of those when I first started teaching and needed a lot of convincing and ‘protecting’ before I was persuaded it was something worthwhile. Therefore, I understand your personal reservations and concerns for children’s enjoyment. All I can say is, we never force anyone to join in and it is not a teaching strategy that everyone would want to use.

2. “How do you respond to the general discrediting of inquiry/discovery learning from empirical and psychological evidence in the last few years?” Two things to say about this. One, mantle of the expert is not ‘discovery’ learning. Heathcote was very critical of that approach. Two, I’m not aware of the ‘general discrediting’ of inquiry learning, could you please provide more information. I’d be happy to discuss it, but I fear we would end up arguing over ontology again and you seem reluctant to engage in that discussion.

3. “Is the role-playing not likely to be a distraction from the learning?” That’s a leading question. Firstly, you would have to define role play. I don’t consider mantle of the expert to be role play. And anything that distracts from learning is a very bad teaching strategy.

4. “Where is the evidence for effectiveness which should have been accumulated in the last 30 years?” This is a great question. We would very much welcome more research into mantle of the expert. Unfortunately research is expensive and time consuming. We are involved in an MA course on mantle of the expert organised by Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln and a number of teachers have written dissertations on the approach, there is an archive at Manchester Met of Prof Heathcotes work, including several MPhil and PhD thesis, and there is a growing amount of ofsted related evidence (which is, as you know, problematic). I would be very happy to send you more details if you are interested. What we really need is a university researcher who would be prepared to study mantle of the expert in detail, over time.

I hope this will be the start of an ongoing conversation between us. I think some of your concerns, particularly over the term ‘expert’, can be easily put to rest, this chapter by Viv Aitken is an excellent introduction. Some of your other misapprehensions are understandable, perhaps you would like to come to the weekend course we are running in March, I can send you details if you are interested. Teachers who come seem to find the course useful.

In the meantime, can I reiterate that mantle of the expert is an approach, it is not ’the’ answer, still less a magic bullet, but it is a strategy for teaching that some teachers, who have studied it sufficiently, find useful and effective as part of a range of approaches they use in the classroom. We are not trying to convince anyone who does not want convincing and we are not trying to make it ‘trendy’. Perhaps what you are picking up is some excitement among those who find it works. I’m sure this is something you would welcome and enjoy. No one is trying to make you use it.

In medicine, if patients showed significant rates of recovery after a experiencing a novel, complex treatment and doctors wanted to know exactly which component(s) of the intervention caused the recovery and why, each of the components would need to be tested independently.

I suspect that there are components of Brain Gym and of MoE that have real, positive effects on some aspects of children’s learning. It doesn’t follow that Brain Gym or MoE as whole approaches are what’s effective, nor that they improve all types of learning, nor that the explanations for their efficacy given by advocates are valid.

Brain Gym exercises, for example, involve students taking a break from whatever they are studying and doing something that requires physical movement, some concentration but little mental effort. Exactly what most people do, and feel better for, if engaged in long sedentary tasks. The type of movements and Brain Gym’s explanation for them could well be irrelevant.

I can see how MoE could enhance a student’s ability to see a situation from another perspective – a useful skill. But the way the term ‘expert’ is employed flies in the face of what we know about expertise, and no one appears to have carried out a rigorous evaluation of the efficacy, or the theory underpinning this technique.

You are right on all three counts Sue. moe is not a whole curriculum approach, but part of a range of different strategies.

Any research claiming efficacy would be subject to critical interpretation, this is always the case in the social sciences.

And if the term was ‘expert’ in regards to the students’ expert knowledge you would be absolutely right. However, Heathcote chose the term ‘mantle of the expert’ with the emphasis on ‘mantle’ rather than expert knowledge. The ‘mantle’ part of the term is in regards to the students adopting the responsibility of experts (within the fiction), the responsibility to learn appropriate information, the responsibility to deal with people with understanding, and respect, and the responsibility to do their work with due regard and diligence.

The purpose of the ‘mantle’ is not to pretend students know what they don’t (this would be a cargo cult) but to create contexts in which their curriculum learning is purposeful and meaningful, and to engender intrinsic motivation to learn more. It draws heavily on the idea (discussed by Willingham & Hirsch) that stories can help students develop language, knowledge and skills.

Thanks for responding, Tim. Although I can see some value in moe, I think Heathcote’s choice of the word ‘expert’ is unfortunate. Moe undoubtedly encourages students to think about situations ‘as if’ they were experts, reveals some misconceptions, and challenges them to extend their mental models of experts’ behaviour – all good things, in my view.

But that’s not how expertise is acquired. It’s acquired via accumulating and understanding relevant information – usually vast quantities of information, by long periods of watching experts at work, and by applying expertise to a wide range of tasks in the real world. The problem with the imaginative world is that although it can provide valuable insights, it doesn’t have quite the same constraints as the reality that’s out there.

I’d add that a major problem with research into the efficacy of educational interventions has been that they have been subject to ‘critical interpretation’ rather than rigorous evaluation – the two are very different.

I attended a ‘progressive’ (and very effective) primary school in the 1960s. The head teacher would have been comfortable with moe – it’s quite possible that she knew Dorothy Heathcote. But there was a clear, explicit, robust rationale underlying the HT’s educational approach – one which I have yet to see set out for moe. The nearest I’ve found is a comment in ‘Pieces of Dorothy’ http://vimeo.com/14360472 that elements of her approach can be seen in ideas such as transactional analysis, neurolinguistic programming and gestalt. Well, of course they can, but those similarities between elements hardly constitute a coherent rationale.

Reply: (Tim Taylor) Nov. 17

Thank you again Sue for your thoughtful comments, I’ll do my best to answer.

“I think Heathcote’s choice of the word ‘expert’ is unfortunate.”

It certainly has become a much more loaded term in the last few years. Maybe if she were inventing the name now should use a different one. I prefer imaginative-inquiry, although that is a wider approach than moe.

“expertise is acquired. It’s acquired via accumulating and understanding relevant information – usually vast quantities of information, by long periods of watching experts at work, and by applying expertise to a wide range of tasks in the real world”

Agreed. The term is ‘mantle’ of the expert’ not ‘pretending to be experts’, there are no short cuts to expertise, it takes time, study and hard work.

“The problem with the imaginative world is that although it can provide valuable insights, it doesn’t have quite the same constraints as the reality that’s out there.”

I agree with this, but it doesn’t have the same dangers either. The imaginary context creates a ‘safe’ environment for students to explore ideas, scenarios and points of view. Similarly, although the ideal would be for students to work in ‘real world’ contexts this is very difficult, time-consuming and expensive to do in reality.

“I’d add that a major problem with research into the efficacy of educational interventions has been that they have been subject to ‘critical interpretation’ rather than rigorous evaluation – the two are very different.”

Again I agree. As I said to Andrew, we would welcome more empirical research. Although moe has ‘been around’ for thirty years, it is only very recently started to be used in schools – I would say the last six or seven years. Those schools that use it and invest in training and research have reported encouraging outcomes. I’ve certainly found it very effective. However, I understand that counts for little on Andrew’s Battleground.

“there was a clear, explicit, robust rationale underlying the HT’s educational approach – one which I have yet to see set out for moe.”

Heathcote was nothing if not robust about her rationale. However, she had little time for academic theory. during her life time she wrote little about the theoretical underpinning of her work, however, many of her PhD and MPhil students worked on these aspects, I can send you a list of their thesis’ from the Heathcote archive if you are interested. Also, Prof Edmiston (a former student) is writing a book about this and I can put you in touch with him if you want to follow it up.

Some further thoughts about the use of CT in Heathcote’s dramatic inventions.

I have been meaning to work with the Chamber Theatre (CT) technique invented by Robert Breen (1) for some time now but have only used its processes sporadically in my teaching so far. Actually 43 years. Being oblivious to Breen’s concepts, until 1982, I learned with Dorothy Heathcote how CT worked. Even then I dismissed it, as a rather quaint way of dissecting texts such was my hubris at the time. It was not until I had to think through the structure of the programme for the advanced year 3 Drama Teacher’s courses with the Amman Summer School in 2012 organised by QERCD (2) in Ramallah Palestine, that it became horribly clear that I had yet again dismissed something of huge importance and significance too early. I do have this shocking habit I am afraid and this has cost me dear over the years. I have attempted, in a very rough way, to give an example of how CT might be used in any classroom from EYFS to adult. (Obviously a better way for readers to understand more is to tackle the book written by Breen in the first place!)

So what is CT in a nutshell and why so significant to MoE?

Robert Breen (3) coined the term in his unique treatise on the analysis of how writers and author’s manipulate (or facilitate) the reader’s dramatic imagination (4) as the reader begins to construct imaginary images triggered by the text in in use. Breen drew our attention to the conventions of western literature (both fictional and non-fictional) analysing so adeptly and originally, how the author’s voice in a written text format is ‘present’ throughout and how it is used in the infrastructure of the written form. He goes on to dissect the author’s voice into 2 functions.

The benign observer’s voice as a description to the reader of the details to create a detailed image of the context or the ‘major or minor narrator’.

The omniscient narrator who has the power to play many functions in the context and not all of it truthful. Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol invented a great example of such a figurewith the ghosts from the past present and the future. All of whom were functioning as narrators in the text and in the later numerous film adaptations. These are examples of an omniscient narrator powerful and almost god-like with the power to lift as well as destroy.

Furthermore, I contend that if we use CT, we are able to delve deeper into these voices, constructed by the author/s for the reader to decipher. This enables us to be in a focussed psychological position more able to decode hidden dimensions hitherto invisible. Furthermore we can enter onto some of the subterranean levels of the text to generate multiple layers of meaning thus increasing our intrinsic emotional enjoyment of literature as well as understand the extrinsic structure that holds it all together.

If we are using MoE as a system for learning, then we will attempt to examine the context of the responsible team or enterprise, under construction and scrutiny, with a view to introducing a wider, relevant set of text(s) to deepen the participant’s understanding and provide significant levels of challenge in their learning. Up-scaling the demand, so to speak, on the intellectual emotional and cognitive powers of learners as a by product.

We see here, yet again, one of the invisible aspects of the teacher’s skills brought to light in the teachings of Dr Heathcote. We can begin the selection and choice of texts but such a process is subject to the experience and knowledge base of the teacher her/himself. How much reading have we done in our lives? What are the literary texts that have influenced us to bring to our classes, and what genres are we familiar with that can be harnessed to the learning journeys we create for children and young adults? This does not speak of how we as teachers have been trained. Rather it speaks of our life experiences that we bring in all its richness’s or tragedies that makes each teaching series unique. In other words we are at the mercy of our limitations as teachers in this respect. Heathcote managed to use and research the vast terrain of her her literary knowledge to select a text to fit the contexts under investigation. (For example she structured an ancient Welsh text, that for most people was completely unknown!) It is clear that this hidden dimension is critical in one of the main constructs she used within the process over time within MoE. I remember very clearly in many of the seminars I attended during my year long (and too short) Masters programme with her on the systems learning approach to MoE, hearing how the overall process needed both internal coherence and tightly sequenced within quite defined parameters. There would always be an enterprise (responsible team), a client who triggered to need for the imagined enterprise/responsible team to take action, tensions would become evident through the building of the day to day conditions and activities of working within the imagined enterprise to comply with the client’s demands or requests. These would form the basic ingredients, with endless possibilities for inventions by learners and leaders of learning (teachers etc.) that we all found ourselves struggling with. Then we discovered that within the working sequences other rhythms were very possible to incorporate. We discovered that we would always need a ‘map’ of some sort, maybe in three dimensional form, or a diagrammatic, model or in another representation of the environment under investigation. For example, the wolf enclosure and surrounding lands in an MoE concerning the re-introduction of wolves in the Scottish Highlands. Furthermore, during the events that followed, later on in the learning process, visitors could be invented in the sequence who would be disempowered to have any influence to interrogate the class, but rather be positioned as truthful ‘unknowing’ visitors from another country (Latvia perhaps) to learn the best ways the Scottish team coped with their challenge. (5) Further forwards in the sequence we could use a range of written text………..and apply CT to the chosen text/s, to challenge the learning of the class further. The question here is what sorts of texts would be possible to use with a class of year 9 students in an inner city environment that could be usefully brought to their learning around conservation of the lupus species in our Scottish Highlands MoE structure? It is a question that haunts me still, as such a choice relies on my inner resources as a human being as well as a teacher willing to research my knowledge and needs base in depth and breadth.

However, comfortingly, I have discovered that the choices for selection of text for CT can be as simple or as complex as needed, depending on the class, their interests, their capacity to be challenged, their reading skills, their willingness to tackle challenging texts together in collaboration and so on. In our Highland example, could I use an extract from the script of ‘An American Werewolf in London’? Or an extract from ‘Wolf Brother’ by Michelle Paver? Perhaps I might use a scientific extract from a technical book appropriate to the wolf agency, concerning the mating rituals of the wolves in Yellow Stone Park US, or maybe a poem……’Tyger Tyger’ by Blake for example………

An example of CT from an age gone by.

Consider this anonymous lullaby as an example of a simple text. I first heard the sung version in my early teens by my mother and grandmother when they used to rock my brother as a baby. My Nan, although from Antrim in Northern Ireland, was a devout Catholic believer. I have no idea if this belonged to a Catholic tradition or an Irish one. In working all over the UK, I have discovered that many people know a similar or very close version.

The lullaby goes like this and perhaps became a children’s song (6) along the way of history perhaps?

It seems to me that if we use Breen’s CT method, we have the possibility of interrogating the text above for hidden meanings, constructing inquiry questions creating further imagined compound images buried in the text.

A reader may ask if any of this is new? Well no, this concept is not new, but the implications for treating the text beyond inquiry and applying Breen’s technique is. Breen himself refers to CT as a technique rather than an art form. However, his elaborate details in the structured assertionsoffer drama and theatre practitioners’ new scope and perhaps new horizons in learning and teaching praxis. We might also remember that Sam Mendes used Breen’s method to construct a deeply moving and startlingly new staged version of ‘As I lay Dying’ by William Faulkner in the 1980’s. (7)

Returning to the text above however, from a straightforward ‘inquiry’ point of view, we have many angles to consider and questions worthy of attention that drive us to seek answers to the text’s current perplexing circumstance. We are, however, very lucky as the anonymous author gives us many clues in the use of the words invented, but for what purpose must remain in the pages of historical mystery.

Our investigating learners can begin to make connections through a diverse mode, (8) of matters outlined in the text which generate layers of meaning, through hypothesis and allied conjectures.

For example:

The singing/speaking figure is signed as addressing another (perhaps) very young figure in some manner or other. We have no idea if the being in question is actually present or if the figure is handling ‘rabbit skin’ as a representation of the child/being.

There is also the question about the length of time the ‘daddy’ has been currently absent, his current whereabouts, and the implications of obtaining a rabbit, perhaps trespassing on land not owned by him resulting in his apprehension by an authority perhaps or an enemy, depending on the period of history and social circumstance we are in.

Also, for what purpose will the rabbit skin be required to perform when, and if, the ‘daddy’ figure returns?

Do the weather conditions prevalent have anything to with the circumstances?

How cold/hot/wet/snowy etc. is the environment the figures inhabit?

Is there the need for the rabbit skin’s warmth, softness or even camouflage?

Where is the ‘song’ being sung?

Is there a tune being used, either known by habit or culture or by momentary invention by the singer?

Is the child/baby in a crib or in the arms of a mother, mother substitute or currently elsewhere?

Are the figures in a dwelling of some sort or in the wild?

For what reason is the song being sung?

What is the health of the child/baby/figure being addressed?

Are the people portrayed ‘on the run’ perhaps escaping to a new place from a place of danger?

To which period of history does this context belong to?

Beyond the singer/speaker are all people referred to currently alive?

Is the singer/speaker alone?

However Breen warns us (9), considerations such as these, however intriguing, have the beguiling but alienating effect that emotionally isolates us and captivates us in the singular realm of intellectual engagement. In addition, the inquiry process alone distances us further from the text in the sense that we focus on the author’s creation itself, almost as in a police interrogation and keeps us in an objective ‘outside of the text’ position. Perhaps, metaphorically looking through a window into the world of the text.

However, if drama is applied in any of its forms, the very nature of dramatic inquiry takes us emotionally closer to the edge of meanings, bizarrely through the very distancing devices within questioning, inquiry and solutions orientated pedagogy dramaturges are familiar with. Many writers have asserted similar theoretical positions, Brecht(10), Ericsson (11) alongside Nora Morgan and Juliana Saxton (12) and of course Heathcote (13).

But let us look at the text in another way, and this time from within. We can use any dramatic device of course to in order to bring the text closer to our emotional being. Breen’s techniques help us here, if we apply his beguilingly simple technique using Chamber Theatre. To do this we ask three simple questions (14):

‘Who might we select/invent to utter words in the section of text under scrutiny?

In what ways can the words written be allocated to protagonists and be uttered so that we might have the opportunity to decipher the point of view the speaker(s) is aligned to, truthful to the context?

Which of the chosen ‘voices’ could represent the function of the omniscient or objective narrator truthful to the context ?’

Using the text of the lullaby, suppose we invent a script in which we keep to the cardinal rule that no words can be tampered with (15), added or edited in any way, as the author’s creation must remain as written and therefore respected. In this way too, the new creators, in this case drama students building on the text, have the opportunity to investigate the questions as an ensemble. Such a process creates the conditions where the divergent is uppermost (Ken Robinson RSA Animate) and the learning will happen in groups.

‘Where great learning for growth is possible.’ Dr Ken Robinson

As investigations become more complex with the connections being invented to create the holding form, (Witkin) convergence will be necessary.

The investigators have to agree a solution to the main questions as above-who might represent the narrator (in either objective or omniscient form). Secondly, which protagonist, true to the context and invented from a variety of dramatic forms, might utter the words? Finally, to decide in situ what point of view is expressed and by whom.

An example

In the following CT example, the points of view can only be demonstrated by the space generated between people, the timbre of the words used as well as the power and pace they are uttered. It is only through drama that this is possible as no written explanation can convey the complexity of the moment of the ‘now’. This is drama’s unique ingredient as an art form and cannot be replicated in any other way. In this manner, authors create drama in the reader’s imagination in the texts designed as such. However, applying CT techniques the dramatic imaginings come to life for the story to be seen/shown and brought into the social setting of communal art. Otherwise the story remains in the mind of the reader of course. Breen’s technique and other allied dramatic procedures elevate this private individualised meaning making process to the shared social one.

Now perhaps we can begin to understand how Dr Heathcote in the 1950’s and 60’s began to apply and incorporate CT technique to her formidable pioneering educational practices. CT and Breen’s allied theoretical framework examining points of view for example and representational concepts in texts, showing the story as opposed to just telling the story, began to tackle and perhaps, answer many of her emerging quandaries concerning the universal nature of theatre and drama forms. Here in the one domain of Chamber Theatre, was a technique that could unify context drama, process drama, theatre form and theatre for performance, in the intimacy of a studio/classroom/workshop.

As history has demonstrated, for Heathcote, this was only a beginning to her application of the diverse forms of theatre and drama later to be incorporated into Mantle of the Expert. As many who attempt the fathoming of her techniques, methods and inventions, we find out to our cost, isolating one small aspect of her genius and claiming to know how her work in entirety, is deeply fallacious. Her work is an amalgam of many inventions. Like any great artist, her emerging collective techniques would be applied as if from a shimmering dramatic based kaleidoscopic palate, and all in situ. This marvellous palate ranged from applied theatre emanations such as Process Drama, Drama for Learning, Context Drama, Drama and Role Play, Mantle of the Expert, Rolling Role, Chamber Theatre and the 4 Projections of Role. In her dynamic way of working these were all practically trialled and developed under her intellectual leadership in the academic drama field. Yet in her work, as seen in the deeply moving account of her work in Ankara Turkey (published in the ND publication, The World’s Greatest Drama Teachers) we glimpse the unerring nature of her quest for the new even in applying such a dynamic learning experience for the learners involved, as well as the teachers and others who witnessed the events.

In the following CT example below, we see a possible outcome from discussions and trials of tackling the main tenets of Breen’s amazingly revealing technique, that of showing the story within the context of an anonymous lullaby rather than telling the story.

[Scenario: The text is set in a remote landscape in Medieval England. A number of figures can be seen around a bundle of cloth of what might be a baby. An armed figure is seen pointing at a figure of a woman who lies still on the ground. The First woman kneels over the lying figure.]

First woman: Bye baby bunting.

Father’s voice: Your daddy’s gone a hunting.

Armed figure: To fetch a little ‘rabbit’s’ skin

Second woman (Narrator): To put a baby bunting in.

In this version we might perceive the beginnings of a tragedy, a mystery or even a black comedy? What has happened here is clearly the result of much debate and discussion within the group as the dramatic context unfolds from the initial seed of the text. The drama students creating this small piece of theatrical art have clearly understood much of how to create theatre form in a textual invention through the choices they have made. In terms of scrutiny we can analyse the 3 questions needed for CT and ask ourselves if, from the newly allocated worded structure, they have been incorporated. We would it seems to me, have to witness the piece live to understand how points of view have been woven in as the bare bones of the theatre text is not sufficient.

The performance issues and enigmas still remain of course. How is the father’s voice emanated and from where? How are the words spoken and signed to emanate meaning? What are points of view expressed by the speakers and so on? All this to be answered by the live representation/performance of a piece of text created years ago and anonymously.

2) QERCD-the Qattan Education Research is the Ramallah based foundation created by the Qattan family to support arts and education in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. The Jordanian Summer School supports over 120 drama teachers a year. This course was initiated and tutored by David Davies (UWE) and Wasim Kurdi (QERCD).

3) Ibid

4) The dramatic imagination is a concept of dramatic theory developed and analysed by Dr Dorothy Heathcote. The dimensions are-SOUND AND SILENCE, MOVEMENT AND STILLNESS, LIGHTNESS AND DARKNESS

5) I well remember a day in Southend Essex in 2001, visiting a class who had investigated bees in their nursery. As a visitor disempowered, I was a member of an imaginary team of visiting bee experts trying to emulate the successes of the nursery class in our bee place. I had to undergo a gentle interview, wear gloves at all times, sign a declaration that I would not touch or harm the hives and wear a visitors badge too. At the end of the afternoon I was awarded a commendation as a visitor who kept to all the agreed procedures agreed at the outset. The curriculum tasks resulting for these children elevated the experience for one visiting HMI as a lesson of outstanding learning impact.

6) The Opie’s wrote the seminal text ‘The Lore and Language of School children’ in 1959 and in other texts I have yet to find the lullaby mentioned.

1. Teacher coach
2. This work is about ‘induction’ not instruction
3. About helping children to ‘become’ people
4. This is a pedagogy that is about how we are with children

John Holt list
1. The ‘invited’ teacher
2. Learning is rarely the product of teaching (delivery)
3. The context generates the children’s interest in learning
4. Teachers as active partners
5. Knowledge rich
6. What sort of teacher are we? The professional learning process.

7. The weekend uses the laboratory method, working, participating & reflecting
8. The focus is not on what Luke is doing, but how he is doing it
9. It’s all about language

A circle of paper
1. Can we please agree this represents an oak tree
2. This is from Tudor time
3. Does anyone know what sort of dates we are talking about?
4. What sort of problems ppl might have chopping this tree down?
5. I’m just going to whizz round the group, any reason you think of why a tree of this size & age would come down?
6. How would a tree of this size get down?
7. How would we get a beam out of it?
8. You think of a tree would cut down to make a table of it? King’s banquet.
9. We are thinking of the implications (you don’t have to defend yourself)
10. I wonder what the tree would say, if it knew it was to be made into gallows?
11. Imagine carving a board, the work involved if you don’t have a chainsaw?
12. Stand please.
13. This is the tree that is coming down, they want the top half, the rest of it is ours.
14. How long is it going to take? What are our priorities?
15. Are there going to be any snags
16. I’ll leave that up to you.

– who might there be that we could invent that could bring some tension, not conflict? Secondary role?
– how do we bring that into the fiction?
– who might the role be & how do you do it?
– how might you represent a grave stone?

Four projections of role:
1. Full role
2. Shadow role
3. Secondary role
4. Teaching in and out of role

17. One of you please represent his lordship, the other bringing the information
18. Just hearing from his lordship, how do you feel about this?
19. Out of the story, was it was to tell the truth?

1. Full role – Always in role, often requires someone else. Representing someone for a while. Someone who is the story, needs the same negotiation. The teacher can then mediate, helping the students, might choose to lower their status to raise the demand on the students. Teacher can stop the fiction & start in order to develop the inquiry.

2. Twilight role (sometimes called shadowy) – used when the teacher is in the early stages of developing the context (frame distance v helpful). Often used to protect the students ‘into’ the fiction.

3. Secondary role – (The giant’s key) The person implied who is not here… Yet. Receiving the role thru other theatrical device.

4.Teacher in and out of role – teacher selects a POV, moving in and out as needed by the students, role always has dimension (what was he like?), what was the role’s function? You might ask: “what sort of person do you want me to be?” Negotiating, for the purpose of developing language. Developing choice & creating demand. Remember the ‘grace element’. Passes the responsibility over to the students. The teacher is bringing the ‘As if’ to the door of the students. The idea is to negotiate.

Can we agree when I put these glasses on I am stepping into a story.

PM

- Protecting the students into the work is a device. Not an integration, about seeding the work about the class, not about the teacher. Professionally ignorant? Not to do with who controls the classroom, it’s about the power to influence.

Bruner

1. Symbolic – spoken/written

2. Iconic – drawing

3. Expressive – dramatic action

Episode 1: Greeks, meeting at the altar (Expressive/Symbolic)

Using Frame Distance

Meeting at the altar – what kind of God? What would the God be responsible for?

have a quick natter with your neighbour, do you want serious times or not serious times?

Have a think: “It is serious because where I come from it is like this…”

Please turn to your neighbour… 1,2,3

TIR “People of Greece, you are here outside the temple… have you something to say?

“Where are your offerings?”

“You bring excuses. Where are your offerings?”

“I will bring the priestesses here if you wish to speak to them…but they will be expecting the offerings”

Please draw an object from Ancient Greece.

Could you please stand around in a circle for a bit, stay with your group – drawings on the floor.

“Now this hoards that’s been found.”

I’m going to ask you to represent this object, not looking like the object (laughter) but just standing…. Some things to think about if you would:

Where about’s do you come from?

Who was your last owner?

And approximately how much are you worth on the black market?

… Let’s have a look and see. There is this collection here…

Could anyone share a story?

The convention, pictures on a vase

- Play,

- dramatic action,

- invested action (what is the artist trying to convey? This is the inquiry)

- Reflection (what do we know about these people?)

15. Teacher in role “it is clear to me…” Researcher, giving information about the context

16. Choose any moment you like from the history of these objects using the Frame Distance List

For a PDF copy click here – this is a much better version of the article as it contains the pertinent graphics and photographs

Using a bridging device

Of all the changes in the new National Curriculum the ones made to the programmes of study for history at Key Stage 2 are going to have the most significant effect on the way primary schools organise and plan their provision.

For one reason the units of the history curriculum will have to be taught chronologically: From the Stone Age to Battle of Hastings. For another, there is a substantial increase in the amount of content to be studied. Curriculum 2000 put the emphasis on developing study skills, allowing more flexibility in terms of the topics and the order in which they were covered; the new curriculum is more prescriptive and content heavy. Schools can no longer choose between the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons or the Vikings, now they must teach all three, in order. Overall there is a 20% increase in the number of units. Furthermore, the new curriculum is more explicit in terms of what should be learnt in these units, putting more emphasis on acquiring knowledge. This is particularly true of the three units covering early British history.

In the new curriculum the single ‘Invaders and Settlers’ unit from Curriculum 2000 has been expanded into three separate units:

Roman Empire and its impact on Britain

Britain’s settlement by Anglo-Saxons and Scots

Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor

For many Primary schools this is going to represent a substantial increase in both the content and the depth that these historical periods have been planned for and studied previously.

In the spring edition of Creative Teaching and Learning I outlined a plan for teaching the ‘Roman Empire and its impact on Britain’ unit through an imaginative-inquiry context, in this article I’m going to introduce part of a plan for teaching the two Anglo-Saxon units. The full plan is too extensive to cover in the required detail here, so I have restricted myself to a brief outline below, for the full plan please visit: http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2012/12/anglo-saxons/

The main purpose of this article is to explore a teaching strategy that can be used to create an imaginary context in the classroom, in particular, shifting the student’s thinking into a imagined space that creates opportunities for them to ask and answer historical questions, explore implications and meanings, and develop deeper knowledge and understanding. The term for this strategy is a ‘bridging device’, which sounds technical and academic, but is really – as you shall see – child’s play.

However, first as promised, a quick look at the outline of the context.

The History Research Team – an overview

Theme: Anglo-Saxons

Age Range: KS2

Inquiry Question: What effects did the Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlement have on the culture and history of Britain?

Expert Team: History researchers

Client: BBC

Commission: To do the background research for a series of programmes called ‘The Really Interesting History of Britain’.

Context: This unit begins with the children looking at the notice-board of a team of successful and busy history researchers. The associated inquiry introduces the students to the work of the team and creates an opportunity for them to ‘step into’ the fiction. The first task for the children is to create the meeting room for the history team from the furniture of the classroom. The second (as the experts) is to give feedback to the BBC for their newly commissioned series ‘The Really Interesting History of Britain.’

They then visit a local Anglo-Saxon excavation site and talk to the archaeologists with the aim of deciding if the site would make an interesting location for filming. To begin with the site doesn’t look promising, however once the team start looking a bit more closely at the background to the artefacts they realise that even the most mundane objects can tell amazing stories.

The found objects in this unit operate as ‘bridges’ into the past. Creating opportunities for the children to engage in learning and experiences both from the points of view of the history research team and the Anglo-Saxon people who lived in the settlement.

This unit works across the curriculum, creating opportunities for students to:

apply their imagination, reasoning and inquiry skills

acquire and apply history skills and develop knowledge and understanding.

develop knowledge, skills and understanding in areas of history, geography, science, art and design, design technology, music, and ICT as well as skills in English and maths.

Creating Imaginary Worlds

Bridging devices are objects or situations that connect two worlds, the real world of the classroom and the imagined world of the context. As an abstract idea this sounds rather complicated, but in actual fact it something children do all the time without being consciously aware.

Here is an example from a game I played with my youngest daughter Ettie when she was about four:

Ettie liked Scooby-Doo and loved getting me, my wife, and her older brother and sister, to chase her about the house being the monsters from the show. The problem was, she didn’t really want us to catch her, if we did she would scream and the overwhelming emotion would make her cry. This was frustrating because she obviously enjoyed the game so much. The answer was to negotiate with Ettie how scary she wanted the monsters we were representing to be. At first she didn’t understand the idea completely and she turned us into pathetic monsters that could hardly walk. This meant, when she ran away the monsters were far too far behind her to be scary. This was boring. So we renegotiated the game again. This time she said she wanted the monsters to be scary and quick, but not too scary or too quick. We had to get close to her, but not close enough to catch her. This was just right and we all chased her about the house, always almost, but not quite, catching her.

Ettie was using us all as ‘bridging devices’. Of course, she was completely unaware that this what she was doing. For her it was all a game and that’s how games work: if you don’t like something in a game then you keep changing it until it works the way you want it to. Viewed as playing, it was all very simple and just needed our co-operation and understanding. However, viewed sociologically, it was incredibly sophisticated and involved elaborate methods of thinking and communication. This is what makes using bridging devices so useful and effective as a classroom strategy. Children understand how they work from their experiences of playing, either alone or as part of a group. If a child picks up a toy crown, puts it on his head and imagines himself as a king, he is using the crown as a bridging device: the crown creates a ‘bridge’ between the real world of his life and the imagined world of kings, castles and knights. This process of change does not need explaining to the child, he understands it from experience and the way it makes meaning within his own real and imagined worlds. It is, for him, and for us, a perfectly natural process; so much so, we almost take it for granted. In fact, playing and playfulness is something many people in education frown upon after children reach a certain age, disparaging it as ‘fun’ or ‘frivolousness’. Learning, they insist, is something hard, something serious, something that requires dedication and practice. Not something to play with. Yet, playfulness and imagination when used ‘seriously’ in a learning environment can create an unlimited number of possibilities and opportunities for curriculum exploration and development. It is an ancient medium that uses both an instinctive understanding of play and the formal conventions of drama and theatre.

In the context I’ve outlined above the children imagine themselves as a team of history researchers commissioned by the BBC to research the history of Anglo-Saxon Britain for a programme called ‘The Really Interesting History of Britain’. Their first task is to visit an excavation site where a team of archaeologists are uncovering the remains of an Anglo-Saxon village. The aim of their visit is to access whether the site could be used as a possible location for filming. The planning steps to establish this scenario are quite straight-forward, here is a summary, for more details and access to all the necessary resources please visit the imaginative-inquiry website:

Step 1: Share the news that the BBC wants us to visit an Anglo-Saxon excavation site

Step 2: Show the team the archaeologist’s map of the dig

Step 3: Come out of the fiction and watch the slide-show of archaeologists at work

Step 4: Prepare the classroom with the children as if it were the archaeological site using ropes, tape, tools etc.

Step 5: Move back into the fiction and interview an adult-in-role representing one of the archaeology team.

This process of moving ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the fiction can be illustrated using this diagram:

In Steps 1 & 2 the children are ‘inside’ the Imagined World of the History Research team.

In Steps 3 & 4 they come out of the fiction (into the Real World) of the classroom.

In Step 5 they move back into the fiction, to work with an adult-in-role.

The negotiation for each move into and out of the fiction is done linguistically – for example, “We are just going to stop our story for a short while to look at this slide show” – there is no need for any elaborate drama moves. As we have already discussed children find this movement in and out of imagined worlds entirely natural.

Each move into and out of the fiction has a strategic function. As with the negotiations with Ettie, stopping and starting the story creates opportunities for learning, discussion and preparation. It is a mistake to think that the story can’t be stopped once it has started for fear the fiction will somehow loose coherence or credibility. In fact, the opposite is true. As with the example above, it would be less believable and less coherent if the History Research team watched the slide-show in the fiction, since they would already know a great deal about the way archaeologists work. Stopping the story and giving the students the chance to watch the slide-show and ask questions outside the fiction (as themselves) is much more coherent and can create valuable opportunities for learning. Indeed this process of shifting into and out of the fiction, creating imagined world scenarios that generate real world reasons for study, is at the very centre of how this approach works.

In the real world context of the classroom most learning activities are of three kinds: The first are activities that transmit curriculum knowledge from the teacher to the students, comprising of information considered important for people to know, some call this information, ‘cultural capital’. The second kinds of activities are those that students do to practice the skills and attributes that they will need to be successful in later life – reading, writing, and maths etc. The third kinds of activities are those that children do to develop their social and emotional competencies, to make them more successful as people in a community – listening, talking at appropriate times, being considerate of others etc. All three of these kinds of activities are preparation for when children are older. By introducing imagined world scenarios into the classroom it is possible to create fictional contexts where knowing this information, being able to use these skills, and having these competencies, has real relevance and meaning.

The excavation site is therefore an imagined context that provides a meaningful and coherent scenario, which can be used to create learning opportunities for children to:

acquire, apply and develop new curriculum knowledge,

practice their emerging skills of historical research,

and interact with someone of authority and professional expertise.

In the next part of this article I will explain how it can also be used as a way to step ‘into’ the past, creating new scenarios where students can explore the content of the curriculum from ‘within’ the historical world of the Anglo-Saxon people.

Creating Bridges into the Past

The slideshow of archaeologists at work that was shown to the students in Step 3 contains a picture of two skeletons apparently in an embrace (see photo). In this next sequence of planning I suggest focusing an inquiry on this photo and using it as the first step in a sequence that invents a second imagined world of an Anglo-Saxon community.

I first used this planning sequence with my Year 4 class in 2012. The ideas and the language used in this sequence come directly from the children’s own reactions and thoughts during that session.

Step 1: Looking at the photo in the slideshow

I put the image on the whiteboard for the children to look at and gave them the opportunity to ask questions, answering as many as I could (my knowledge was very limited). I reminded them this image is from a real archaeological dig and these are real people.

“This photo is from a real dig, I don’t know who these people are or why they seem to be cuddling. They are not from the archaeological dig in our story. However, they could be, if we wanted to invent something like them.”

Step 2: Drawing the skeletons

They thought they would, so we took a large sheet of sand coloured sugar paper and drew an outline around two volunteers (one child at a time, to spare them their blushes), I then asked some of the other children to add drawings of bones – skulls, rib-cages, etc.

Note: At this point I took the opportunity to do some direct teaching on skeletons using a computer programme, a model of a skeleton, and pictures I photocopied and laminated from a book. The class were fascinated by these images and wanted to make a number of different skeletons in different positions around the classroom. When this was done we returned to the original ‘embrace’ drawing.

Step 3: Clues

Teacher (T): “I wonder what brought these two people together?”

There followed a short discussion, where the children suggested a number of different ideas.

(T): “It might be there were some clues on the bodies that were discovered by the archaeology team when they looked closer.”

At this point I asked one of the children to take a lead. I choose a student who I thought would understand the task and give the others something to think about.

(T): “Leon could I give you this pen and ask you to draw a mark on one of these skeletons. This mark represents an injury, not noticed initially by the archaeology team, but discovered later when they examined the skeleton back in their lab. I might give a clue to how this person died.”

Leon drew a small crack at the back of one of the skulls.

Step 4: Inquiry

(T) I leant over to look more closely: “What do you think might have caused an injury of this kind?”

Note: The aim of this question was to create an opportunity for the children to explore a range of different ideas. I was encouraging them to be playful with their thinking, not frivolous, but open-minded and divergent. I was not asking them to come up with the ‘right answer’

After a short discussion I decided to shift the inquiry in a different direction.

Step 5: Using drama conventions to represent the inquiry: ‘What might have happened?’

I asked the children if they would be prepared to represent their ideas as if they were images from the past – a picture of the action that caused the wound, but the moment just before it actually happened. This stopped the general discussion we were having around the picture of the skeletons, but opened up a new activity for exploring the same question. The children quickly organised themselves into smaller groups and found spaces to work around the room. Some needed a bit of support to get started and I moved around the groups offering help and asking questions where I thought I was needed.

After some time working together the groups were ready to share their different ideas. Each group took a turn while the other children watched and asked questions. The children answering the questions answered them as the people they were representing, rather than as themselves. Something like:

Children: “What have you got in your hand?”

1st Soldier: “It’s a sword.”

Children: “Do you know the soldier is behind you?”

2nd Soldier: “No, I’m fighting. I can’t see what’s behind me.”

And so on. My role in this exchange was to help the children asking the questions to make meaning from the image the group was making, while also protecting those in the image from frivolous, embarrassing or unnecessary interrogation.

Teacher to the children watching: “It seems this was a blow from behind. Does that seem cowardly to you?”

Children: “No, it was during a battle. That’s what happened in a battle.”

Teacher: “Yes, I see. But how does this explain the way the person was buried. That is still a mystery.”

I turned my question to the people in the image.

Teacher: “Can we ask if there is another image we could see, that would explain how this person was later buried in an embrace? It is still a mystery to us.”

The work continued in this way for the rest of the session, with each group offering different ideas about how the people died and why they were buried in such a strange way. Gradually we began to gather some information about their lives: what things were important to them – family, clan, ritual, beliefs – and how their lives were different to our own – threats from violence and invasion, struggles against hunger, disease and injury. This was an emergent process, involving four sequential steps: experimentation (exploring possibilities in groups), action (the creation of the images), inquiry (asking questions), and reflection (making meaning).

Later we collected this information in various ways:

As a class on the white-board,

Individually through writing (a recollection written from the point of view of someone who witnessed the event),

In groups through drawings and models.

In this way the embracing skeletons functioned as a bridging device into the imagined (historical) world of the Anglo-Saxon community, creating a new context for the children to explore the curriculum and develop their knowledge, skills and understanding. In effect after this activity we had two imagined worlds: the imagined world of the expert team and the imagined world of the Anglo-Saxon community. As illustrated in this diagram:

This created a much wider and more flexible range of opportunities for engaging the students in both the work of historical investigation and the world of the Anglo-Saxon community.

The following is a list of some of the activities we planned and used in the classroom following the creation of this context:

Built a 3-D model of the Anglo-Saxon village

Made maps of the site

Wrote reports to the BBC

Invented the artefacts found by the archaeologists and made facsimiles

Made drawings of the objects

Invented stories about the objects’ histories

Recreated drawings of the Battle of Hastings for the Bayeux tapestry

Researched the Christian conversion and created ‘evidence’ for the archaeological site

Researched what happened to Harold’s body after the Battle of Hastings and how this news reached his wife and family

Wrote an account of these events from the point of view of various characters – soldiers who were there, family who hear the news, servants who watched and heard etc.

Researched Anglo-Saxon history for the BBC commission

Researched Sutton-Hoo and how the Anglo-Saxon invasions changed England

Researched the Staffordshire Hoard and how the Norman invasions changed Anglo-Saxon England

Wrote draft script for the episode on Anglo-Saxon history

Read Beowulf and wrote ‘lost’ legends

Researched burial rituals and how these changed over time

Researched Alfred the Great

And the Viking Invasions

Creating drawings, writing, art work and artefacts that ‘hinted’ or gave archaeological clues to those times

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/10/creating-bridges-into-the-past/feed/0Why learning and having fun are not inimicalhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/10/why-learning-and-having-fun-is-not-inimical/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/10/why-learning-and-having-fun-is-not-inimical/#commentsThu, 10 Oct 2013 19:14:46 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1069Of all the arguments I’ve read, from the plethora of education bloggers over the last year or so, the one I find hardest to get my head round is the supposed dichotomy between enjoyment and learning.

Learning, it seems, is a very serious business and teachers who look to make their lessons fun are committing the cardinal sin of putting their student’s enjoyment ahead of knowledge acquisition and skills development. When I first read this argument I was a little perplexed and it took me a while to unpick the different strands. In so doing, I came to the conclusion that these bloggers had a point, but that they were overstating their argument. This blog is an attempt to explain why.

The argument against making lessons fun has three connected claims:

1. “Learning is more important than having fun”

Which is true and, furthermore, is true in all circumstances, in a classroom context. It seems obvious to me the primary purpose of a lesson is for the students to end up knowing more than they did when they started (I’m using the term ‘knowing’ to encompass all dimensions of the learning process – acquisition, application, and development of knowledge, skills, and understanding) and if anything, including having fun, gets in the way of this then that makes the lesson less effective.

I’d like to propose a maxim upon which we can all agree: learning is always more important than having fun (in a classroom context).

With that sorted, we move on to the next matter…

2. “Focusing on fun can distract students from the purpose of learning”

Well, since many things can distract students from the purpose of learning – a wasp flying in the room, an empty belly, falling out with their friends – and many students do not need much to distract them, especially if the lesson is boring, then, I think we can all agree, this is also true.

However, since many things can be distracting then this is not an argument against ‘fun’ per se, but a general criticism of any teaching strategy that distracts students from the genuine purpose of the lesson.

If we follow this logic then any strategy that distracts students from the genuine purpose of the lesson is a bad strategy. Including, we must conclude, not only things that make the students enjoy the lesson, but also those things that make them not enjoy it. Including being bored and/or intimidated. There is a good chance if a student finds a lesson boring or is embarrassed by the teacher, this is what they will remember when they leave the classroom and not the intended purpose of the lesson. Of course, no teacher deliberately sets out to bore their students or to embarrass them (I hope), but these can be unintended outcomes of a teacher’s strategies.

If this logic is true of teachers who do not want to make their lessons fun, it also true of those that do. I would hope no teacher intends to distract students from learning by making a lesson really exciting, however, I suppose it might happen occasionally.

Is this reason enough not to make (or at least attempt to make) lessons fun? Not for me. I’m not a perfect teacher and I’m sure I’ve made many mistakes (far too many for comfort), but making my lessons so much fun that the kids forgot they were learning, is not amongst the ones that keep me awake at night.

Although I think the critics have a point (certainly focusing more on making a lesson fun than an effective learning experience is a serious mistake), I think making a lesson fun is only bad if the students only remember how much fun they had and can’t remember the learning intention. The argument seems to be more a warning about overcooking puddings, than an argument for not cooking puddings at all.

There are, I believe, far worse crimes perpetuated on children than trying to make lessons fun. But that is a subject for another day.

3. “Fun is frivolous and unimportant, and has no role in the classroom”

This all depends on how we define the term ‘fun’. Certainly fun in the sense of ‘messing about’ or ‘showing off’ has no place in the classroom. Neither (as I have argued) do actions from the other end of the spectrum – ‘bullying’ or ‘intimidation’. These extremes are inimical to the learning process and have no part to play in an effective learning environment.

Fun can also be interpreted as hollow and meaningless, a spinning bowtie of irrelevance, that beguiles the students, but adds nothing to the true purpose of the lesson. This is a damaging association and I have some sympathy with the argument. Certainly, as I hope I’ve established, anything that makes it less likely for the children to learn – either intentionally or unintentionally – is a bad strategy, and spinning bowties, stories that beguile, tricks, pretending, and illusions all fall into this category.

Similarly, although for different reasons, there is no place for the ‘teacher as clown’. This is showing off of a different kind. It is not our role to entertain the students and if we adopt it we deny them opportunities to contribute and to develop effective learning strategies including dealing with difficult situations. Sometimes learning can be a hard slog and doing something worth doing takes time and effort: If we spend all our time thinking of ways to entertain our students we are doing them a disservice and misinterpreting our profession. This I think might be a misunderstanding of the way we think of play and work. For some people these are at opposite ends of the spectrum, but for those that become genuinely effective learners, play and work are dimensions of the same experience. They do not see them as separate, but as complimentary and equally important.

Perhaps ‘fun’ is not the right word to describe the commitment, effort, and time it takes to learn something difficult and complex. Would Andy Murray describe his close-season training sessions in Miami as ‘fun’? It seems unlikely, but he would probably say they are enjoyable and important. ‘Fun’ is a word children use, especially young children, and we shouldn’t rush to dismiss it. However, unfortunately, it is laced with connotations of frivolousness, which make it difficult to use seriously. I suggest we substitute ‘fun’ with ‘enjoyable’ but not in a passive sense, like being entertained, but in an active participatory sense, where the learner finds enjoyment from the activity of learning, even (perhaps especially) if the learning is difficult. This is a point made by Matthew Syed in ‘Bounce’:

“It is only possible to clock up meaningful practice if an individual has made an independent decision to devote himself to whatever field of expertise… where the motivation is internalized, children tend to regard practice not as gruelling but as fun” (P.83 Kindle)

He further illustrates this point by quoting Serena Williams, “It felt like a blessing to practice because we had so much fun.”

The point being: learning does not have to be boring, nor does it have to entertaining, but it does have to mean something to the learner. This, I think, is the nuance that is missing from the ‘anti-fun’ argument. Of course it is bad practice to make lessons vacuous or so distracting the students forget what they are learning. Just as much as it is bad practice to make lessons so tedious and boring they loose the will to live. But there is no reason at all not to try to make learning enjoyable, to make the context interesting and attractive to the learners, to offer them a way in and to give some opportunities to contribute and be heard.

I’ll finish by sharing a heuristic from a teacher who understood the importance of really listening to students and using their ideas to create genuinely interesting and enjoyable learning experiences, Dorothy Heathcote. I use this continuum all the time in my teaching to try and gauge where I think my class are, individually and collectively, in regards to the context we are studying. Notice it doesn’t mention ‘fun’.

Talking about drama
– Inside and outside the fiction
– co-constructed, so the children can influence

Into the fiction

Activity: 1. make up three things about yourself, two a true & one is not. Partner has to work out which is untrue.
2. Take the ‘lie’ of your partner and use it on a different partner.
Purpose: what we have to do as drama practitioners.
We all know that this is a fiction. Which is liberating. Translating it into the medium of drama, great liberator, but also with constraints. Kids are moving into a ‘make believe’ setting, where there is no ‘penalty’.
It requires us to be able to make up on the spot.

Secret Agents – animal welfare (‘framing’ or building a context)

Supposing we were going to represent just for a little while a team of secret agents.
Just think, what could this possibly give us as curriculum possibilities. Opening up possible landscapes.
Secret agents who care about animal life, welfare, well-being
Consider the difference between secret agents and secret agents ‘who’.
What does that bring to the table in terms of the curriculum?

Step 1 adult in role (AIR) – representing someone who has been working for the team for a long time.
2. AIR sits
3. Class make a note: what might be true of this person
4. Class write on a piece of paper and place at the feet of AIR
5. Discussion – class classify & sort

Group 1
6. In groups, stand where the role is seeing something that disturbs them
7. One group represents a photograph others look and make observations
8. Teaching the form of art… Reading the form

Group 2
9. “Can I ask the people on this side to find out as much as you, just find out a little bit more. I’m going to activate you to speak.”
10. “Is there anyone who has some information, could they just let us know.”
11. “Can I ask the people in the fiction, what kinds of questions were you asked?”

Group 3
12. “This time pleas try without using questions of interrogation.”
13. Focusing on the action, “I’m noticing this…”

Four projections of role:
1. Full role
2. Shadow role
3. Secondary role
4. Teaching in and out of role

– a highly disciplined approach. Look what the role generates, do more with less.
– we’re not asking permission. “Can we agree?”

1. “Imagine yourself in Henry VIII court, I’m going to ask you to represent a figure in our museum, and I’m going to ask you what you are made of.”
2. “I’m going to go round and ask you, ‘You are made of'”
3. “Please do a quick sketch and what you are made of, & a market value, what sort of price are you likely to fetch?”
4. “Hold them up”
5. Implications… “This must mean…”
6. “What questions does that raise for the museum curators?” More implications.

Saturday afternoon – WWF animal smuggling

The concept of frame and context – differentials between the two
-Frame: agents working undercover for the WWF to obtain accurate info concerning the trafficking of endangered species from around the world
-Context: police have intercepted various messages concerning the trafficking of various animals. We are to relay this our trusted informants, using a simple recognition system & await any information forthcoming.

“Come over hear, what do you make of these?”
– one regarding a large order of sea horses for the home aquarium industry, as well as other animals…

Think about the evidence, “what evidence have the police managed to get?”

1. stand together
2. “so ladies and gentleman, we are fairly sure we have enough evidence, but we don’t want to end up with egg on our face…” Etc (speaking inside the fiction)
CONVENTION 1: The role(s) actually present.
3. “Do you want the judge?”
4. “Device with a partner, one sentence that will persuade this judge ”
5. The group co-construct the letter, through the sentences.
6. The AIR (judge) listens outside the fiction.
7. Come an stand over here (next to the board) – a list of what would persuade them. “Run thru the letter in your head, does it meet the criteria.”
8. “Judge could we ask you to run through the criteria…”
9. Group discuss whether the letter meets the criteria.
10. “If you have a question for the judge, now is the time to ask it.”
11. Give group chance to discuss what questions they might have.
12. Question the judge
13. Consider it from the view point of the judge.
14. Luke asks each person if they would sign it as the judge.
15. Exploring it from other potential points of view.

Dramatic imagination
Darkness/light
Sound/silence
Movement/stillness

Sunday morning

1. The skills of make believe, ‘as if’ – building authenticity
2. Representing others – ability to see it from other’s POV
3. There is always something going on – always tension, anticipation, challenge
4. It’s about something, disturbance, always something going on
5. The client applies a ‘press’
6. It happens now
7. It is open to discussion

1. Inquiry: “What would we need to consider if we we were responsible for finding & recovering bodies from an under water wreck?”

2. (General discussion 2mjns) “What would an irresponsible team of builders do?”

3. (Stepping into the fiction) Please answer this next question ‘as’ the team of divers: “What would we never do?” Stand in a circle to answer.

4. As people give suggestions – (emphasis): “What does this tell us about our values?”

5. Teacher in Role (TIR): opportunity to fins out more, people can ask questions, i.e. “How much do we know?” ; “What is the time limit?”

6. (Outside) “We are going to think about creating some of the artefacts?”

7. (Expressive) “Could I ask you for a moment to think about what you need to do to prepare for a dive… Can you just think of one thing you know you would do… The first thing, just for a moment… Just step into the representative mode…”

(Teacher demonstrates an example)

8. People step into the fiction, “Could this side of the room reflex… Please look, what do you notice?”

9. “What he is doing… What has he got to meditate about? (Looking at the others) “can you see any others in a state of apprehension?” (People are noticing the ‘sign’)

10. “If you wouldn’t mind just going over and asking these people…” (Conversational, not interrogation)

11. “Ladies and gentleman would you mind coming into the briefing room.”

12. (TIR) “concerning this next dive, we have some tensions… It is a particularly deep dive, bear in mind time, please check all the equip.”

13. “Are there any questions?” People ask questions inside the fiction.

14. Step outside the fiction to share the responsibly of invention.

15. (Reflection) “What tensions are emerging?”

16. “How might we represent ourselves when we go down into the water? What’s the job we’ve got when we get down there? Just give yourself job down there.”

17. “Can you let us know the job.”

18. “Just get into a position where the job is finished… 1.2.3.4.5″

19. “This side please look at what you notice…”

20. “What would happen really if you stayed over time?” (Inquiry)

21. “Could you string three actions together… It could be the beginning the middle and the end.”

22. “Could I just this team here keep an eye on this group here… OK… Off you go”

“Are you getting the impression of water here… Their not under water, we know… Does that seem ‘watery’ to you?”

(Protecting people into experience)

Play

Dramatic Action

Invested action

Reflection

Day 2

Responsible Team: Adventure Travel Firm

Client: organising a holiday for a family that have recently come into some money

Inventing the context

Q: “What’s up?”

Solution focused… What does she need to help her?

1. “Please get into a picture from an adventures holiday brochure”

2. 1,2,3,4…

3. “We got…” (Reflection).

Convention: “when would you have… In the responsible team” (the context)

4. “What is the caption? How are you going to represent the caption.?”

5. “Did you notice anything about us?”

6. “It must mean…”

7. “Is there anyone interested in….?”

8. “Could you just create photos that are not in the brochure and would never appear?”

9. “Just have a little talk… Why won’t this photos ever appear and where is it?”

Device: to look at the photos in another way.

10. We’re just going for a quick whizz around the room…”

11. “Is there anyone who would find anything interesting about this one?”

12. “Could you just find out… They will speak to you?”

13. “So, what are we finding out?”

14. “I heard the words?”

15. “Who do you suppose took this photo? So, let’s invent it then…”

16. “Let’s check that out…” (Asking)

17. “What can you see in your head?” (Dramatic imagination-the art form of drama)

Jack and the beanstalk

How do we build the context, how does the teacher shift to

1. “Does anyone recognise this woodcut?” (Inquiry start)

2. “I don’t remember a daughter… Who are these folks… How might we explain these other people?”

3. “Who says that?”

4. “Where do you think his eyes are, where is he looking”

5. “Maybe he sizing it up – we’ll soon have this down” (hinting at role)

6. “This is a Lithuanian version, different story.”

7. “How do you think in their version…?”(narrative)

8. “How did the square get there?” (Implications)

9. “So the impact on the house?” (Implications)

10. “Explore with you the possibilities…”

11. Rolls up his sleeves. (Moving into role) (noticing the significance)

12. “Just to agree for a minute, I’m going to gather you over here… Just going to help me out…” (Convention 1 – in real time)

(Group now framed as builders by agreeing to follow and listen…)

13. Luke starts to talk as the builder about the house… The group join in with the fiction.

We have some film of Finn, our son, when he was a few months old. Claire and I are on our knees on the dining room floor, taking it in turns filming Finn as he makes his first tentative steps. Accompanying Finn’s unsteady movements are the sounds of laughter and joy, along with coos and chirps of encouragement. As Finn waddles towards the camera giggling, you can hear Claire and I saying things like, “Come on Finn… there you go… ooh, up you get.” Finally Finn finds his balance and takes a stumbling step forward, this is followed by another, and then another. The final one ends with him falling, laughing, into Claire’s arms. Both adults cheer: “Clever boy, clever Finn.”

Wind forward eleven years. Finn is now twelve and in his second year of High School, he is reading out-loud a piece of writing he has done for homework. The purpose of the writing is to create a police report from the book Holes. Finn’s writing is, as always, full of expression and detail, peppered with the odd metaphor. Towards the end he becomes less sure of the piece and when he finishes, he looks up with a quizzical look.
I ask him, “What do you think of it?”
“I thought it started well, but it went a bit wrong at the end.”
“Why do you think that was?”
Finn gives his considered answer and we talk for a while about how he might make some revisions.
“Anything else?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“What was the purpose of the writing?” I ask.
“To write a police report.” He answers.
“Was that a police report?” I say.
He says he doesn’t know, he’s never read one. We talk for a bit more and I offer to find one for him to read.
I ask, “Do you think you would like to write it again?”
He says he would… After he’s played FIFA13 on the Xbox.

Praise under scrutiny

Praise is one of those strategies we usually consider to be an unquestioned good. In our training we are told to praise children, to make them feel good about themselves, and to motivate them to learn and behaviour better. Praise, we are told, is much better than criticism, much more effective and much less damaging to children’s self-esteem. These truisms are presented as facts, things we all know through common sense.

However, in recent years some writers and researchers have been challenging this ‘unquestioned truth’ and making some very unsettling assertions. Foremost among these is Alfie Kohn who attacks the whole strategy of rewards and punishments and has consequently attracted a great deal of flak. His book “Punished by Rewards” is a devastating assault on what he calls ‘pop behaviourism’ and how this theory, has over time, pervaded the whole education system with wrong-headed assumptions and strategies. Through 400 pages of meticulously referenced argument, Kohn examines the evidence and logic of behaviourism, coming to the conclusion that much modern research undermines its basic assumptions and claims.

Much of his argument is now well known and accepted wisdom in industry, as argued in the very readable “Drive”, however, one aspect of Kohn’s thesis is still extremely controversial; this is his assault on the use of praise.

Kohn attacks the use of praise on three fronts: the claim it enhances performance, the claim it promotes positive behaviour, and the claim it helps people feel good about themselves.

Against the claim praise enhances performance

It turns out the research evidence on the relationship between praise and achievement is very limited and the two studies that do exist are not supportive. One found: “Praise does not correlate with student achievement gains.” The other concluded: “Correlations between teacher rates of praise and student’s learning gains are not always positive.” [Kohn, p. 98]

Kohn gives four possible reasons for this:

“When someone is praised for succeeding at tasks that aren’t terribly difficult, he may take this to mean he isn’t very smart: this must be why someone has to praise him.”

“Telling someone how good she is can increase pressure and she feels she has to live up to the compliment. This pressure, in turn, can make her more self-conscious, a state that often interferes with performance.”

“Praise sets up unrealistic expectations of continued success, which leads people to avoid difficult tasks in order not to risk the possibility of failure. Praise encourages some children to become dependent on the evaluations offered by their teachers.”

“Praise, like other rewards, often undermines the intrinsic motivation that leads people to do their best.”

Against the claim it promotes positive behaviour

When I first started teaching and became a parent I believed, without reservation, that praise was an effective strategy for encouraging good behaviour. I certainly used it a lot in my classroom. Unfortunately, the research evidence is less conclusive. A study in 1991 [Kohn p.102] found that those children who were frequently praised by their mothers for displays of generosity tended to be slightly less generous than other children on an everyday basis.

Kohn maintains: “Praise is not more effective at building a healthy self-concept. We do not become confident about our abilities (or convinced we are good people) just because someone else says nice things to us… the effect of praise may once again be counterproductive rather than merely ineffective… the most notable aspect of a positive judgement is not that it is positive but that it is a judgement.”

This seems to me the key point to this part of Kohn’s argument. The evidence is, once again, inconclusive but pointing marginally towards praise being counterproductive. However, the reasoning behind not using praise is sound. Praise as a strategy to influence behaviour is the use of authority over another person: “Telling someone her work is good is every bit as much a value judgement as saying it is bad.” In my experience making a value judgement of the quality of someone’s work puts the emphasis on the judgment (good or bad) rather than on the work. This is something many of us have experienced when we get a mark and a comment with a piece of work, we concentrate more on the mark, than on the comment.

I’m not saying (although Kohn might be) that there is something morally wrong with making judgements. In fact, I would argue, we do it all the time and it would be difficult to imagine being a teacher without making judgements. However, it is important to be aware of the effects of the judgement on the other person, especially if our aim is to develop that person as a learner. Look at the effect observation judgements have had both on the morale of teachers and on their attitude to being observed

However, there is even worse news. The children we should really worry about are the ones that crave praise from adults: “Praise is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us… sustaining a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions… this leads to a dependency on approval.” [p.104]

Further, “not all children react the same way to praise…identical statements made by the same teacher under the same circumstances produce different results for different students… people’s various experiences… [and children’s reactions to praise] may also vary according to a child’s background and personality.”

Against the claim it helps people feel good about themselves

This, I believe, is the most disturbing of Kohn’s attacks. Who doesn’t like saying something nice about another person? Or hearing encouraging words? Surely he can’t be against compliments and being nice to each other, especially children? Well, frankly, he’s not. These are his own words:

“My reading of the evidence does not require us to stop smiling. It does not suggest that we ought to hold ourselves back from expressing enthusiasm about what other people have done. It does not imply that we should refrain from making positive comments. Apart from the fact that few of us are about to take such drastic steps regardless of what the data shows, my point is that there is no reason we should.” [P.106]

However, there are some serious aspects of this kind of praise we must keep in mind. He suggests two general principles:

Self determination – with every compliment we make we need to ask ourselves, is this helping that individual to feel a sense of control over his life. Or are we attempting to manipulate his behaviour by getting him to think about whether he has met our criteria.

Intrinsic motivation – are our comments creating the conditions for the person we are praising to become more deeply involved in what she is doing? Or are they turning the task into something she does to win our approval?

We must examine our own motives: First, are we trying to control someone’s behaviour for our own convenience; second, how do our comments sound to the individual who hears them; finally we need to attend to the objective characteristics of what we say and how we say it.

This I now think of as either insincere praise or a sincere compliment. If the intention of my comment is to manipulate the person’s behaviour for my convenience then it is insincere. However, if I can say without fear of contradiction that my comment was a genuine compliment, without manipulation, in a form that the person hearing it took as honest and heartfelt, then I think it is as sincere as it is possible to be.

I think the first story of Finn at the start of this blog illustrates this point. Our words of encouragement and praise were genuine and sincere. They were part of that whole happy experience, heartfelt and not manipulative. Would Finn have walked without them? Of course he would. Children have been learning to walk for hundreds of thousands of years and very many of them did it without a single word of support or encouragement. Did we praise him because we thought it would help? Maybe, but I don’t think we thought about it. I think the words were natural and spontaneous without the need for calculated reason.

The second story is quite different. Finn is now much older; the skill he is gradually learning to master is unnatural and quite difficult. It involves many hours of conscious practice, reflection, and evaluation. Praise and encouragement of the kind we gave him as a baby learning to walk would be entirely inappropriate. But does this mean we shouldn’t praise him at all? I would argue, yes, and for several reasons. The first is Finn wasn’t after praise, he didn’t ask for it and he wasn’t looking for it. What he wanted was feedback, information that he could use to get better. Although he was proud of what he had done, the motivation to do and then share his work was intrinsic: he was not after a reward. As a family we don’t use rewards at all, no stickers, treats, or even pocket money. The kids don’t expect them for what they do and they don’t ask for them.

Second, Finn had got the task wrong. However, sophisticated his use of language, however, elaborate his plot development etc. the truth was, it was the wrong genre. He’d written a story, when he should have written a report. What purpose would praise have played in pointing that out to him? “You’ve done a brilliant job Finn, but its wrong.”

Third, praising him, his work, or the effort (even though it was wrong) would have been a value judgment: my value judgment, my view of his work. What we want is for Finn to be able to make value judgments of his own work. If we keep doing it for him, then how easy is that? What will he learn other than that other people’s opinions of his work are more important than his own?

As I said earlier, none of this is easy and the water is very murky. Do we never compliment our children? Of course not. But, we should try as hard as can to think about what we are saying and to keep praise to a minimum.

Kohn argues we should re-frame student’s failures (like Finn’s) as a problem to be solved, he makes four practical suggestions:

Don’t praise people, only what people do

Make praise as specific as possible

Avoid phony praise – a parent or teacher who is genuinely delighted by something a child has done should feel free to let that excitement show. Praise becomes objectionable when it is clearly not a spontaneous expression but a deliberate strategy, a gimmick.

Avoid praise that sets up competition – “you’re the best in the class” etc.

Finally he reminds us, “when we contemplate the reality of emotionally impoverished families, or the effects of unrelenting criticism, let us keep in mind that the problem is not too little praise. It is too little encouragement and support.” [p.113]

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/the-problem-with-praise/feed/4Trivium: the answer to the purpose of education?http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/trivium-the-answer-to-the-purpose-of-education/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/trivium-the-answer-to-the-purpose-of-education/#commentsTue, 17 Sep 2013 19:43:16 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=1019“Enthusiasm is the search for essence… of intensity and work that is essential for high achievement. This is the idea of mastery: discipline, focus, work, beauty even in ugliness, truth, and the pursuit of in-depth knowledge. This is, perhaps, what Plato thought of as ‘being awake’”

The Purpose of Education

When thinking about the purpose of education it is easy to see how the wider aspirations of the state can clash with the more human concerns of students and their families. While government ministers focus on ‘measureable’ outcomes, league tables, and their latest position in the OECD rankings, parents are more focused on how well their child is doing at school: socially, academically, and emotionally.

As a teacher and a parent I am interested in how the demands of the state impact on my children’s experiences of school, both the students I teach and my own three young children. While recognising the wider purposes of education – forming national identity, developing social cohesion, and ensuring economic prosperity – are important and worthwhile, I am also disturbed by how the mechanisms of state privilege government priorities above all others.

Over the summer I read two excellent books on this subject. One, Stephen Ball’s ‘Education Debate’, dealt with this topic at the macro level, with chapter headings such as ‘Education policy, economic necessity and public service reform’. The other, Martin Robinson’s ‘Trivium 21c’, was a much more personal journey, focusing instead on a father’s search to provide a good education for his young daughter.

While I enjoyed both books enormously, and recommend each of them without hesitation, it was Robinson’s book that had more resonance and direct application to me as a classroom teacher and concerned dad.

Philosopher Kids

“I would advocate that every stage of schooling should prepare students for becoming wise, knowledgeable, and virtuous.”

Robinson’s book is about the history of curriculum and pedagogy. It is a fascinating explanation of how our education system has developed an ideological schism at its heart and how the purpose of education and the way children are taught has become a battleground for competing sides of the debate. It is also an attempt at a resolution for this division, a recommendation of a way forward to a middle-ground where perhaps teachers can develop a new approach to education.

In contrast to his own education, which he says was awful; Robinson is determined that his daughter’s experience of school will be entirely different. He has high aspirations and wants her to do well, not just academically but also morally and spiritually. He wants her to have an education that will prepare her for the future, teaches her the important lessons of the past, and helps her to become an active and considerate citizen. He describes these qualities as the qualities of a ‘philosopher kid’ – a kid who can think for themselves, ask questions, and has a sense of civic responsibility. These aspirations, he argues, should be the aim of all schools, for all their students.

To develop this point he borrows a metaphor from Plato: “The cave is the journey from prisoner kids to philosopher kids… [When] they [learn to] admire wisdom and love pursuing it… the child is ready to assume the mantle of the philosopher.” This he explains is an active process, not one where the students passively acquire information and skills: “students need authentic experiences – doing, making, creating, and being: Alongside the more abstract curriculum.” Philosopher kids are not docile pupils, sat silently receiving wisdom from better-informed adults; they are active citizens in the process of developing their own “authority”.

To further illustrate this, Robinson refers to the ideas of the 16th century essayist, Montaigne, who argued, “schooling should not be about whether someone has learned a great deal but about who has ‘understood best’. Teachers should not just ‘spew’ out their learning, they should pursue understanding… we should not just take on the ideas of others; we need to make them our own, obtain wisdom and, importantly, enjoy it.”

Robinson expands this point about enjoyment with a further quote: “There is nothing like tempting the boy to want to study and to love it: otherwise you simply produce donkeys laden with books. They are flogged into retaining a pannier of learning; but if it is to do any good, learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.”

For Robinson it is not enough that his daughter will leave school ‘cleverer’ than when she went in, this is a minimum, what he wants is for her to love learning, to have opinions of her own, to stand up for things that matter to her, to be considerate and caring, to be wise and discerning, to appreciate beauty, and to be a responsible and active citizen.

These are not ‘achievements’ that appear in charts or league tables, but for us human beings they are what we want for our children above all else.

Trivium

However, at the centre of the curriculum/pedagogy debate is a “large and almost unbridgeable divide” that has been there from the beginning. On one side are the advocates of tradition and continuity, on the other, those that promote discourse and critique. In modern terms these are called Traditionalists and Progressives. Both sides, Robinson argues, “wish to treat schooling as a simple ideological battle.” They are entrenched; convinced they have the better argument and are “unwilling to embrace the complexity” that would emerge if the two sides were brought together.

The trivium, an ancient idea, he hopes might be the answer. Both curriculum and pedagogy, the trivium is “three ways of doing things” – grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Put simply:

Grammar is about knowing:

Learning about the ways things were or are

Passing on knowledge from one generation to the next

Dialectic is about questioning:

Challenging the ways things are

The idea that this educational process can help in the birth of new ideas

Rhetoric is about communicating:

Showing how things could be

Including the belief in ethics, sound argument and appreciation of the beauty of language

It is the process of reflection, evaluation, and communication.

Although each element of the Trivium is essential to a ‘liberal education’, there is an inherent contradiction between grammar and dialectic. Grammar, in the sense of a body of knowledge and agreed systems, places value on certainty and expertise. Dialectics, in the sense of inquiry and critical debate, places value on questioning and open-mindedness. When the two come together these values cause tension and complexity. This is the ideological difference between traditionalists and progressives that Robinson describes as the ‘unbridgeable divide’. As a teacher, I’ve sensed this tension throughout my career, without being able to give it a name.

For those that sit at either end of the ideological divide there is no compulsion to embrace the views of those on the other extreme. The idealogues are keen to call the divide a dichotomy, to tell us we have to take sides, they use words such as battle and struggle, and call each other rude names, like denialists and dinosaurs. They tell us our choices are either/or. Either we use this strategy or teach in this way; the other ways are wrong and ineffective. Even to the point of saying, if our experiences are otherwise we are delusional or enemies of children.

I’m cautious of certainty in education and have always been of the opinion that teaching is essentially a practical pursuit and ideological dogma of any kind is unhelpful. For me, the dichotomy is rhetorical rather than logical: It does not have to be either/or, it can be both/and. In fact, in the real world of school life, this is the messy complexity of mixed methods that we embrace every day. Tomorrow I’m working with a class of Year 2 children, the first session of the day is writing (in the trivium this session would be categorised as grammar and rhetoric), the second session is reading (again grammar), the third session is maths (grammar), the fourth session is phonics (grammar), the fifth session is drama, art and history (grammar, dialectics and rhetoric). I don’t think this would constitute a particularly unusual day for a primary school. At different times there is an emphasis on acquiring knowledge, at other times the emphasis shifts to applying that knowledge, and at others the emphasis is on communicating and investigating to develop understanding. This is a curriculum of both/and. As Robinson argues, the trivium is not an approach that says children must wait until they are ready; it is an approach that has to be used at every stage of education.

This process of education brings together the three elements of the trivium, embracing all the inherent complexity and contradictions, and forming something new: “Separately the arts are unable to deal with the complexity of our world; together they can begin to educate our children properly through their contradictions. We need to put our disagreements into the centre of the curriculum…Together the three arts of the Trivium are more than a sum of their parts. Developing a further art – whether this is called wisdom, virtue or a good life.”

The strength of Robinson’s idea is that it makes explicit the discreet elements of a complete education and explains why there exists a tension between them. The trivium only works if each element is developed concurrently, not necessarily in the same lesson, but over a similar time period. The teacher’s role is to plan a balanced and coherent curriculum that uses and develops all three. This is not straight-forward and will mean a further argument about how much time we should spend on each element, however, I see it is a way forward; bridging the divide between the two dichotomies of tradition and progression.

The Authentic Curriculum

Towards the end of his book, Robinson makes a list of criteria for teaching in our schools. I think it is a terrific combination of the different elements of the trivium that constitute a far more ambitious objective for education than ‘driving up standards’. He incorporates in his list the notion of logos, which is something above and beyond the accumulation of facts and the development of skills. Logos is about reaching up and developing values and dispositions that transcend simple schooling: “the teacher can begin with didacticism: there are certain simple things that can be taught, because the world is, and always has been, complex, there are ideas beyond the simple and these are dealt with through dialectic. We start with the simple that can be known, move on to the complex that can be discussed and investigated, until we reach another, more metaphysical understanding. This I take to be logos – faith or universal essence – which is known or felt.”

While I said earlier, it was not unusual in a primary school day to incorporate all three elements of the trivium, how often can we honestly say we aim so high as to develop this notion of transcendence in our students? This is the challenge that Martin Robinson’s wonderful book makes of us; this (in my view) is the true purpose of education, above and beyond the machinations of politicians and ideologues.

The Trivium Criteria

Because it is so great, here is Robinson’s list in full.

“The way to do this, to make the kind of school I would like to send my daughter to, is to listen to both the conservative and liberal impulses. So, here is my list of criteria for teaching in our schools:

Cultural capital should come from the teaching of knowledge and reflect the best that has been thought and said. This should involve complexity and difficulty, so there should be space for students to criticize, to think, and to develop their own character, as well as develop their own enthusiasm.

Schools should develop a curriculum that responds to change, as well as being rooted in a sensitive awareness of our traditions and how they are evolving. It should seek out academic, cultural, social, artistic, and physical challenges that are authentic, that stretch each child, and give them experiences they would not otherwise get.

Schools should teach the importance of a sceptical approach to both tradition and modernity. Children should be encouraged to be curious, to question and debate, but alongside the idea that the institution in which the debate takes place deserves its place in our civic society because it provides space for that debate.”

• To visit the archaeological site
• To work with the archaeologists to safely bring back the artefacts
• For a new temporary exhibition at the BM on life in Ancient Greece
• To design the exhibition:
o Display the objects in an exciting and informative way
o Explain to visitors the context of the exhibition
o And the finding of the body
o To explain about the historical context – role of the hoplites
o To create a possible reconstruction of the young soldiers life using historical sources

Context:
The remains of a young hoplite from Ancient Greece are found in a cave. It appears from the evidence that the soldier was trapped in the cave when the roof fell in. Along with the remains of his body, archaeologists discover his weapons, armour and a bag of personal possessions.

This essay is from the late historian and teacher, John Fines (1938 – 1999)

Published posthumously in the International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 2002

I wish to consider the nature and function of imagination in the teaching of History, and I must confess straight away that this is not the first time I have attempted such a task. Indeed it is perhaps worthwhile admitting that I approach this essay with three largely different drafts behind me, and hope that in the writing they might consolidate themselves somehow into a more coherent picture.

It may seem strange that such a topic should be so daunting, for we use the word imagination in education with fair regularity and not a little conviction: we urge our pupils to show imagination, we often judge them ostensibly on the quantity of imagination they have demonstrated and, to be brief, apart from some caveats to which I shall return in a moment, we consider imagination to be a good thing.

I think also that many teachers would automatically assume that imagination shown by the pupil would come in a written response, rather than in any other form. I suppose the long traditions of English education partially dictate this, but it has also been reinforced by the ‘creative writing’ boom of recent years as well. We should note, however, that imagination can be just as well exercised and shown in speech, painting, construction, dance, acting – a plethora of things; but it may also be seen at work in how one tackles humble jobs, too: it takes an imaginative person to work well in the confines of time, and in strange places (like libraries); people should see the need for imaginative design of approaches to work and study.

For most people, I guess, imagination as shown in a pupil’s response. It consists in the individuality of that response, its uniqueness, as it were. From our own imaginations we pluck that which is new, but it is not just the novelty we admire, for any piece of trumpery rubbish could be novel; the newness of the idea produced by the imagination is a newness that we all suddenly recognise as valid, and wish, perhaps, that we had thought of it first; indeed if it is a particularly good idea we have half a mind to think we did vaguely approximate to that idea ourselves, but never quite got round to expressing it, a night thought that got away. Some new ideas are so blindingly simple as to draw universal conviction, as when the poet speaks. The line of poetry, the form the sculptor finds, the theme of the symphony, all seem to have been present from the beginnings of time, only awaiting discovery and expression.

And here I think we meet the first major difficulty in considering the use of the term imagination in education, for it is a word that attaches itself to the finest products of the greatest minds much more naturally than to the grubby essay of the schoolchild, and in a comprehensive world are we at all wise to expect such quality? Imagination deals with images and symbols, helping us to enter new worlds and fix their dimensions with a figure. It aids us to engage in mental gymnastics in which paradoxical associations and reorderings of the known can effectively create new views of a startling and stimulating nature. It enables us to break the normal rules of thought by using exhilarating side-slips, free-wheeling, out of gear racings to fit together intuitions, hunches and guesses into whole new sets of possibilities. It enables us to think in other men’s minds, to assume roles for the time being in order to understand more completely than our own personal vision can manage. To be brief, it enables us to see, and to see how, beyond the capacity of our neighbour.

And we expect this of schoolchildren? Why, surely not? Yet without falling completely into the romantic traps of the Blakean image, it is fair to say that the child’s mind, whilst not possessing the capacity of that of the poet or inventor, does frequently operate in similar dimensions and uses similar techniques, until the twin forces of social and physical maturity clamp down those inhibitions that make so distressingly many of us into ‘normal chaps’. The child can frequently operate in the domain of ‘let’s pretend’ and ‘what if’ when the ‘normal’ adult will respond with cries of ‘Don’t be silly, dear, that’s pure imagination on your part’. For we must not forget the pejorative use of the word in education (and indeed the world at large); to say of someone ‘he imagines things’ can be very close to saying ‘he thinks he’s Napoleon’ which tells us at once that the man is mad. We have a wariness about ‘let’s pretend’ and ‘what if?’ that indicates a deep-seated fear of fantasy; it is all very well for novelists, but children are told ‘now don’t tell stories’ for ‘stories’ are lies, assaults upon the conventional picture of the world, attacks upon normalcy.

This fear of and easy denunciation of ‘silliness’ is a constant factor in adult-child relationships, and is very natural. Anyone who has taught will recognise the potential for destruction, chaos, wild uncontrolled giggling that rests just underneath the surface of groups of children who are ‘off the hook.’ What teachers need to see (and here they must use their imaginations) is the direction that children’s imaginative perceptions might tend towards, if given sufficient support and encouragement. Good teachers learn that at the moment they wish to say ‘that’s just silly, dear’ they should be thinking how it might be made into a greater sense.

But before we can encourage imagination in children we must needs consider its relationship to other forms of thinking, knowing and learning; a simply unrestrained encouragement to imagine can produce all those false notions bound up in idle fantasy we have noted above as constituting the adult’s fear of imagination. This may be seen in the sort of vapid question teachers often ask, such as ‘Imagine you are Louis XIV. Write an essay on how you spend your afternoon’. The setter of that question quite clearly deserves all he gets, and is of course in no way promoting imagination, merely behaving stupidly.

I want at a later stage to suggest that imagination is a quality intermixed with other processes, and treat it as best understood and best promoted when it is seen in that way; but at first we must attempt to crawl, rather than to run, so I will be making two propositions about imagination assuming it to be an entity; later reasoning may well require some modification in these propositions, of course.

First I wish to propose that there are two kinds of imagination, similar in process but leading to different ends, and second that both involve certain levels of imaginative thinking that may be roughly defined.

The first kind of imagination, I would suggest, concerns itself with seeing and picturing a part of the past, a faculty that at its extreme and yet most primitive form is expressed in the notion of the seer, the conjurer-up of the dead. This, in History, is the function of the story-teller, and may have many dynamic aspects, in that the story may well be complex and moves forward in time; yet the basis is an attempt to picture one thing, to show what happened more than to explain. Now it is well appreciated that the narrative form is one vehicle of historical explanation, indeed for many historians (and for most historians for a proportion of their time) it is the supreme explanatory tool. We cannot deal with the past except in terms of an answer to the question ‘What happened?’ (or, in the more simple form of the extreme narrative historian, ‘What happened next?’); yet there is a somewhat static form to this visionary aspect of the imagination, for it is a unitary task (however great may be the effort) to see and to show. The very choice of subject for picturing implies some comment, and in the telling, all sorts of points of view may be used, moral values implied, but the imaginative artist is trying to paint one picture, and if he has any respect for his craft as an historian, he will be trying to paint it in Rankean terms. One need only pose the opposite position (that is trying to show the past as it didn’t happen) to show the poles of historian/not historian. One may, of course, debate the possibility of the Rankean aim, its sensibility, its implied assumptions endlessly, but that is not the point here. All we need to know is that this kind of imagination is trying to show a portion of the past as it actually happened.

If we, for the time being, call that the static imagination (and I am all too aware at this moment of the falsity of many of the implications of this term) what of the dynamic? This I wish to denominate the perhaps more scientific cast of the imagination that wishes to explain, to interpret, to evaluate, to understand, to reconstruct in action.

In this domain we might put questions of the order of ‘Why did she do that?’ ‘Why did prices increase?’ ‘What effect did that have?’ ‘Was this caused in this way or another?’ ‘How did this happen?’ ‘When did this begin or end?’ and ‘Where was the centre of this movement?’ The list of questions could be much more thoroughly explored and examined, but it is their type I wish to explore for the time being. Now all of them require many other features of thought than just imagination (the detective function of logic is clearly important here) and we shall be exploring that interrelationship in a later part of this essay; but what elements of imagination do we see here?

Interestingly I think it is that intuitive aspect of empathy that comes to the fore, for unless the thinker can see different propositions at work in a human context (of real and specific human beings about whom we know some unalterable facts) he cannot proceed. Logic may aid the student to reclassify his evidence (he may for example have learned by rote to rearrange his evidence in terms of chronology, geography, or the standpoint of individuals concerned), but until he may see the reclassified evidence working according to the new pattern he cannot judge the validity of the reclassification.

Effectively, explanations made largely by logic may only be tested and enlarged by the imagination. I say here ‘largely by logic’ because it is very clear that imagination frequently takes a part in the making of that first hunch about association, but this is a factor not easily explored in the historical process, and requires considerable psychological expertise which I lack, so for the time being I must leave that aspect alone.

My first proposition, then, suggests that there are two ends to the imaginative process in historical learning, one that produces a picture, the other an explanation. Quite clearly these processes cannot be seen as exclusive and we should not give the name of ‘History’ to anything that doesn’t partake of both; this is merely an attempt to classify that may or may not prove useful in the end. Their interrelationship is most clearly shown in my next proposition, in that they share a similar hierarchy of achievement.

One might pause here to question whether we actually need a hierarchy of achievement. It is easy to see the need teachers feel for some way of testing how well their pupils are doing in any particular piece of learning, but it is not always right to follow this need and provide the tools. What I am suggesting here is one possible way of defining the steps taken along the road of learning, in the knowledge that these steps depend on circumstances, and may be taken many times. This implies that a very great historian may, in certain circumstances, find him or herself in the position of taking only step one, and a small child might well find in his circumstances the need and the possibility of taking step three. The hierarchy I shall put forward is a very simple and unoriginal fourfold sequence: moving from description, through analogy (or simile) to image (or metaphor) on to the final stage of symbol. These terms are mostly drawn from aesthetic domains, but for the moment they will serve our purpose.

The first level of the imaginative process is the minimalist position of describing, in which the learner is saying ‘I can only tell you what I see’. It is this level of description which has brought a bad name on narrative history and on what I have called static imagination in both historians and students of history. For although the imaginer is making a small effort to see, to define the area of problem, he is for a variety of reasons unwilling or unable to go further. Yet that cautious first step is a necessary part of the sequence if the remainder is to be undertaken with any honesty and critical skill. Alone it is pointless; without it, the rest is merely fantasy.

The second step is a large one, the move to show and explain by reference. What the pupil is saying here is ‘What I have described looks like so-and-so, or seems to be this type of thing.’ Here knowledge and experience are brought into play in order to give focus and actuality to the subject in a process of discovery of what is really going on. But we should also note a larger, more poetic quality seeping into this simple exercise, for each comparison enlarges our view of the nature of the object of study.

The third step is even greater, for it involves a movement from ‘it looks like’ nearer to the area of ‘it is’ and involves that willing suspension of disbelief so essential to the imaginative process. The metaphor that becomes an image has a fixing quality when we dare to use it, and it requires us to enter the subject of study with our whole personality and belief. Here the empathetic process must take place in which people are not just described as ‘working like ants’, for example, but where we get a sense of their sweat and the cracking pains of their muscles. Similarly in dynamic imagination this is the stage where the theorist must start to believe in his theory a little in order to test it out: ‘So, now let’s imagine HitIer didn’t intend to go to war, how would it all look then?’

The fourth step, into symbol, is the hardest yet and in that it crowns the process we might reserve it as an unachievable peak. This is a matter of judgement, but there have been many occasions in classrooms when I have seen it quietly but perfectly competently achieved. The level of symbol in this formulation is the level where one hunts out the words and phrases (following the pictorial and comparative pattern enunciated above) which will give newness to old material – succinctly it is the putting of old wine into new bottles, a thing the historian constantly attempts. Thus all historians of the period knew the old facts and interpretations of Thomas Becket, and felt that they could not be surprised when Professor Knowles gave his Raleigh Lecture. He didn’t tell them anything new, any fact they didn’t know, but by the stresses he placed on certain elements, by the arrangement he made, they saw afresh the man Becket, and said ‘How true it seems – I never really thought of it that way, yet it rings true to my way of thinking as well’. For Knowles took the blushing of Becket and made it significant, made it a symbol of the man – the man who lacked control, who stammered, grew angry, loved, was impetuous – and flushed with pleasure. Thus the little was made big; because it showed and explained, the symbol held.

So far imagination has been treated as an entity, a type of behaviour that may be viewed separately. This has been for purposes of analysis only, for it is obvious that there is no state of mind which may be defined as ‘just imagining’ nor is there any classification of mental activities wherein we may apportion exactly some parts to imagination and others to logic. Thinking is an intermixed process, and when we try to reduce it to tabular arrangement we are in danger of over-simplification.

It is clear that there are a number of elements that go to make up ‘historical thinking': we need knowledge of historical facts and a store of experience about human behaviour from which to draw when we are trying to understand those facts; we need a number of skills of organisation and deduction; and of course we need imagination. It may be objected that the knowledge of facts and experience is merely ‘mental baggage’ which shouldn’t be accorded a place in a study of mental processes, but the having of these things is inextricably bound up in the desire to gain more, and the ability to make use of the materials themselves. Of course all this depends absolutely upon the motivating power, the will to do History (which we can most conveniently call curiosity); without this, the ghost in the machine, nothing can work.

Wherever we look at the use of facts, experience and skills we find them not only bound up in one another, but also reliant upon imagination in some way. Without prior knowledge, for example, speculation cannot begin, but it is the speculation that drives us to search for more, and it is the speculation that uses the knowledge, validates it for memory. The more knowledge we have, the more we soak ourselves in the period or topic, the nearer we are to getting the picture, but without the functioning of the imagination the picture will not come.

A similar interconnection may be established between experience and imagination: the person who lacks experience cannot compare, cannot ever find a name for what he sees. On the other hand the unimaginative person may be possessed of a wealth of experience which is never used: haven’t we all met the bore who has been round the world? The child with a very small amount of experience can still recognise anger, for example, by reference to his small store of experience, and can look for causes and results of that anger, if he has the imaginative capacity to do so.

In relation to the operation of skills (particularly the use of logic) imagination has also a vital role to play, and is totally intermixed in the process. One may operate the rules of deduction automatically at command, but if the activity is to be self-generating, the idea behind the deduction must appear first, to stimulate and guide the process.

Let us take one simple operation to stand as an example: we often ask learners of History to apply the test of plausibility to evidence; in doing so we require all four aspects of historical thinking. We need to know the facts, and almost certainly to find more; we need to draw on experience to say ‘Would I believe it, would they believe it?; we need a number of technical and logical tests (was it possible for this man at this time to have said such a thing?); and finally we need imagination to summon up the picture and to suggest and test the hypotheses for explanation.

Thus we must be very wary of considering the function of imagination in isolation; clearly it is both allowable and valuable for philosophers to attempt a separate definition, but if we are considering the working of imagination, when defined, we must see it as it is, but also as a part of the process. How, then, might we act as teachers, following this discussion of the issues? Only a tentative answer may be given at the moment, because this paper is concerning itself with principles, but it should be possible (if it has any validity) to translate those principles into action fairly readily.

First, teachers should recognise what they mean by imagination in historical learning (which may involve being aware of the two kinds), and encourage it by rewarding it. Once they have seen it in action they should be able to operate a simple scale, looking to the fourfold hierarchy established here as a guide. Quite certainly, few pupils will reach the fourth level, but it is still important to press most pupils to reach levels two or three when the occasion offers.

Secondly, teachers need to be clear that, although they may recognise and reward imagination separately, they must encourage it in all aspects of historical learning. Thus when the pupil is searching for information this must not be seen as merely a routine operation, but an area where imagination can operate as well. The pupil must ask some questions of the process: not just ‘What am I looking for?’ but also ‘What will I be surprised to find, and what will confirm present opinion?’ The formulation of questions which guide the process is a most important issue in determining its success.

One thing is very clear, at least: if we are to encourage imagination in every aspect of historical learning there will have to be a great deal of thinking, talking and discussing about what is happening, in process terms, and not just talk about the materials, the evidences themselves. One of the great lessons of the evaluation of the Schools’ Council Project History 13-16 has been that asking pupils to think and talk and debate about what they are up to when they are doing History is one of the key factors in developing historical learning. It is the consciousness with which we do things that counts in success; this is not to deny the validity of the intuitive steps the poet and the inventor takes – the most important things they know are that they are poets and inventors.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/imagination-in-history-teaching/feed/1Some further planning for The Roman Box Unit: Boudicca & the Romanshttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/some-further-for-the-roman-box-unit-boudicca-the-romans/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/some-further-for-the-roman-box-unit-boudicca-the-romans/#commentsTue, 10 Sep 2013 15:58:08 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=982This planning is an additional sequence of steps for the Unit: The Roman Box

In this sequence the children:

draft & make a proclamation from the Roman Governor,

create an Iceni settlement,

organise daily tasks for different groups of people in the settlement

represent the people in the settlement on the day the proclamation arrived

discuss how to deal with the demands of the proclamation

decide how to deal with an even bigger problem

Stepping into the past: Boudicca and the Romans

Resources:

The painting of Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar.

A copy of the story of Boudicca and the Romans appropriate for the age of the children

(Optional) a copy of the Battlefield Briton documentary

Paper for the children to write their ‘final copy’ of the proclamation

Pictures of an Iceni village/settlement (for whiteboard and/or printed out and laminated)

List of buildings etc from the settlement (see resources in planning unit) – printed, laminated and cut out

Skipping ropes to represent the fenced border of the settlement

(optional) Resources for making the village

List of the settlement tasks (see resources in planning unit) – printed, laminated and cut out

This sequence follows on from the inquiry using the painting: Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar. You can either start it directly after or come back after exploring the Roman Box sequence first.

1: The painting – Remind the children of the painting by showing it again on the whiteboard.

2: Read the Story of Boudicca and the Romans.

Note: there are many versions of this story for children of different ages, which can be easily found by searching the Internet using the term: “Boudicca for children”. There is also a BBC documentary film from the series Battlefield Briton (you kind find a link to the YouTube copy of this programme at the end of this unit). However, be warned the film does contain some graphic descriptions of violence and will not be suitable for all children.

3. Draft a proclamation from the Roman governor of Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, to the Iceni tribes after the defeat of Boudicca.

“What, do you think, would the Romans demand of the Iceni tribes to ensure they would never again rise up in revolt?” For example”

Hand in all weapons?

A third of all jewellery?

Pay a tax of a third of all crops?

One half of all animals born?

Etc

“What language would the governor use?” The official language of command and rule.

Model this with the class

Discuss and suggest vocabulary

Punctuation

“How would this proclamation be communicated to the Iceni people?” For example read out by a Roman soldier in each Iceni settlement.

Children work together to create draft copies of the proclamation

These are shared and checked for spelling, punctuation etc

Children make final copies of the proclamation

A single proclamation is made for the story, using samples from the children’s work

4. Creating the Iceni Settlement

Share the pictures of the Iceni settlement with the class

“What do you notice about this community?” Discussion

Bring the children on to the carpet:

Ask them to sit in a circle.

Ask them to make the fenced border of the settlement using the skipping ropes.

Hand out the list of building etc so the children have one each.

“Who has the well? Where do you think we should have the well? Where might this community choose to have the well?”

“One at a time please place your building where you think it would go best in this settlement. As you do it could you please explain your thinking.” For example, “The pig pen goes here, at the edge of the settlement, because of the smell.” Etc.

(Optional) The children could now draw and/or make the different buildings etc in the settlement.

5. The settlement tasks (see resources list)

Organise the class into small groups

“I’m going to give each group a copy of some of the tasks done in the settlement by the Iceni people. Could you please take a look and organise them into one of four categories: Tasks for Men; Tasks for Women; Tasks for Children; Tasks for the Elderly.

Hand out the ‘Settlement Tasks’ cards to the children working in groups, a complete set for each group.

After the activity is completed ask the children to take a look at the work of the other groups and share their thinking.

6. The day the proclamation arrived

Dramatic Action – “Imagine there is another painting of the settlement showing the people at work on the day the Romans came with the proclamation. Could you please imagine you are someone in the settlement occupied on a task, you might be collecting berries from the wood, you might be making a sword, feeding the pigs, or fixing clothes.”

The children decide where they would like to be in the space and represent the person in the settlement at work.

“The people of the settlement were at work when the Romans came. Doing the tasks they did every day. Unaware their lives were about to change forever.”

“What were you doing the day the Romans came? Where were you?”

Dramatic Imagination – “Please relax for a moment”

“How did the people in the settlement know when the Romans were coming? Was there a look out? Did they shout? Or was the first sign the sound of the soldier’s marching feet?”

“So, let’s try this again. Please get back into position.”

“The people of the settlement where hard at work, the first sign that things were about to change was the sound of look out’s cry from the top of the hill. ‘The Romans are coming’. This was never good. As the people looked up, they saw the look out running down towards them, then they heard the sound of the soldier’s boots and saw a flash of light as the sun caught the tips of their spears.”

Reading the proclamation – “Without pausing the soldiers marched into the centre of the village”

An adult (or teacher) in role (AIR), representing the commander, carrying the proclamation speaks:

“To all the people of the Iceni Settlement, I have an proclamation from the Roman governor of Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus. Every person must be present to hear this important announcement.”

The children gather to hear the reading.

The AIR reads the proclamation and answers questions.

After the proclamation – “With that the Romans left, leaving the Iceni people with their thoughts.”

Allow some time for discussion and reflection.

“What can we do? They are so much stronger than we are? All our armies have been defeated? Our queen is lost, no one knows if she is alive or dead.”

“We will have a meeting this evening to decide what we must do. Please bring along your weapons and your valuables.”

7. Some hard decisions

Outside the fiction, the children spend some time drawing something valuable they would each like to keep hidden from the Romans. These will constitute the focus of the next inquiry.

“Once you have drawn your valuable thing, it could be a sword or a piece of jewellery or some other object, could you please think of a reason why it should be hidden from the Romans. Remember we can’t hide everything, they will be suspicious and we know they are capable of terrible acts.”

The children decide how they would like to have the meeting; it might be in a circle on the carpet or a ring of chairs.

The meeting begins with each member of the settlement showing what they have brought and why they think it should be hidden from the Romans. The community discuss the implications.

Note: It is not essential that everyone gets to show their object, this is more about building tension and does not need to be dragged out.

8. An even harder decision

When you judge the moment right…

An AIR, representing a tired man, arrives asking for permission to talk to the people of the settlement. He brings an important message, his Iceni clothes are tattered and torn covered in dark marks, which might be blood.

“Thank you, I thought us lost. The Romans are everywhere. I have a secret, can I trust you?

“Outside your walls, hidden in the trees, are Queen Boudicca and her daughters. They are tired and starved, all we ask is that you take us in and hide us from the Romans.”

I had been teaching for four years before I thought to ask my class what they thought was the purpose of school. The answers I got back where fairly predictable, “To get a good job when I’m older”; “To make more money”; “To learn more stuff”. These children were seven.

The reason I asked them was because I had noticed, unless they found an activity useful or enjoyable, many of them tended to lose concentration, and become distracted and disengaged. As a consequence, I seemed to be spending a great deal of my time trying to get them back on task.

This was both disconcerting and very hard work. A year can be a long time in a primary classroom, where you spend every hour of every school day with the same children, if these children are not self-motivated to learn.

My class were one of these and they drove me close to distraction. They were full of energy and enthusiasm, but would very quickly lose focus and were rarely prepared to listen or stick to a task once it became boring or difficult.

I had tried two well-worn strategies to solve this problem. The first was to plan activities I knew the children would like. This was fine in as much as when they were enjoying themselves they were much easier to manage, however, this strategy had the major drawback of not focusing the children on their learning. They were certainly having a good time, but they were not studying much.

The second strategy I used, was a system of punishments and rewards. I wrote a list of rules that went on the classroom wall, which I enforced rigorously, and a chart for recording stickers which I gave out for good work and good behaviour. This strategy kept the children in check, but it demanded very little effort from the students, other than compliance. The stickers soon lost meaning, as the children started focusing more on getting the stickers than on their own behaviour or their own learning.

These were short-term fixes that meant a lot of work for me and very little learning for the students. Keeping them going meant I had to be either a fun-time entertainer or a stern disciplinarian: An exhausting and generally ineffective juggling act.

It was about this time I decided to ask my class why they thought they were at school. As I have said already their answers were not particularly surprising, but they did make me think. They seemed to fall into one of two categories. In category one, they thought school was about preparing them for their future lives: “Learning will help me get a job when I leave school” or “Learning will help me make more money.” As motivations these seemed like very long-term goals for seven year olds.

I thought if I had to learn Japanese for a job I might be doing in ten years time, then practicing my Japanese pronunciation and developing my vocabulary would not be top of my current ‘to-do’ list. I would have more pressing concerns in the here-and-now: Such as spending time with my friends and family and studying subjects of more immediate use. There would be plenty of time (I would tell myself) to study Japanese later.

This, it occurred to me, was one of the problems I was experiencing with my class. They understood, well enough, that the work they were doing was important (or would be in the future), but it was not very urgent. They were finding it difficult to care much about doing things and learning stuff that might be useful one day in the indeterminate future, but not today.

The second category of answer, “Learning stuff”, was equally problematic because it was neither useful nor precise: ‘Stuff’ could mean anything. My students did not seem to have a vocabulary to talk about or understand what they doing in class or how they could get better at it. Again, they seemed to understand (in a vague way) that what they were doing was important, but not really so important that they could be bothered to care much about it now.

What the two categories of answer had in common was a lack of immediacy. The students saw school as a place where they practiced and learnt ‘stuff’ that might be useful in some imprecise way, at some indeterminate time in the future, but this future was so vague and distant they were not prepared to put much effort in to it in the here-and-now. This is why they wanted the lessons to be enjoyable, at least that way they could have a good time while they were doing the tasks.

Covey and urgent/important heuristic

I mulled over this problem for a while and tried various adaptations to my two main strategies. Nothing seemed to work very well, in the long term. And then I had a break-through, I read Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and saw a table on time-management that seemed to suggest an answer to my problem.

Covey’s table is a heuristic model for thinking about effective ways to manage time. It is divided into four sections:

The purpose of each section is to classify an activity depending on its urgency and importance. Unimportant activities should be avoided or minimised. Important activities should be prioritised and given more focus.

Furthermore, Covey argues, highly effective people manage their time so that they spend as much time as possible in the ‘important/not urgent’ quadrant, working on projects that will bear fruit in the long term. He maintains these people choose to do this because they are self-motivated, focused on the goals they want to achieve, and enjoy some control over how they will accomplish these aims.

As I looked at this table I began relating it to my own work and the work of my class. What I wanted was the children working consistently in quadrant 2 – focusing their efforts on long-term goals – but what I saw (more times than I was comfortable with) was the children getting bored or distracted and sliding into behaviour more associated with quadrant 4 – idle chat, frivolous activity etc.

I thought about Covey’s analysis and decided the reason for this slide was that the students did not find the work sufficiently meaningful and had not yet developed the necessary qualities, attitudes and dispositions of those people Covey called, ‘highly effective’:

My students were not self-motivated towards learning

They were not sufficiently focused on long-term goals

And they had (or took) very little responsibility for the way these goals would be achieved.

Later, as I read around this subject, I learnt these problems were ones of agency, power/positioning, and intrinsic motivation. At the time I knew none of these terms, but I began to realise that the children in my class were not focused on learning, but on their own personal and social needs. Indeed, they were, if anything, learning-averse. Their attitude to learning was as something to avoid if possible, rather like an unpleasant chore that has to be done, but is best got over as quick as possible. If the learning was ‘fun’ they would go along with it for a while or if there was some kind of bribe – in the form of stickers, free-time etc. – but they were not disposed towards learning as something valuable or worth doing well or spending a moment too long on.

I concluded, this was why they were getting distracted and ‘messing about’ when they should have been learning.

I decided tackling this issue would become the main, long-term, focus of my lessons. I printed off a copy of Covey’s table and used it as tool for assessing the children’s engagement at different times and as a way of evaluating their disposition towards learning. I began making notes when I observed children sliding from quadrant 2 into quadrant 4, trying to spot what triggered this change.

After a while, it became apparent to me the intersection of ‘urgent and important’ in quadrant 1 had a different significance in the classroom, than the way Covey used it in his book. For Covey, an effective person would avoid quadrant 1 tasks (which they would view as time-consuming fire-fighting) by being organised and dealing with tasks before they became problems. Their aim would be to avoid tension and focus on long-term goals. However, in the classroom (where children are generally less self-motivated) the ‘important/urgent’ quadrant is not so much about time-management as creating activities that are purposeful and immediate. Demanding from the students a higher level of commitment and participation.

I realised I could create urgent/important problems (from quadrant 1) that would make learning activities more meaningful. Activities, that were not about preparing for some dim and distant future, but about dealing with problems in the here and now.

Here is an example:

Imagine planning a lesson for Year 1. The purpose of the lesson is for the students to practice writing warning signs, in order to prevent a terrible accident. Your aim is for them to learn some new vocabulary (stop, warning, danger, etc.), to use an exclamation mark, and to practice writing clearly and legibly.

The class are studying Traditional Tales. You choose to use the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Developing the context

Read the story to the children

After the story has ended, turn back to the start of the book where there is a page with the goats in a field.

“I wonder if the Billy Goats knew the troll was under the bridge?”

Have a discussion with the children where they share their ideas.

“What if the story was slightly different and they didn’t know about the troll. What could we do to warn them?”

Children share their ideas.

“But what would happen if we weren’t there (we can’t be there all the time, we’re busy people) and some new goats came along? I wonder if we should put up some posters, warning anyone coming to the bridge, that there is a hungry troll underneath?”

Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation

“I’ve got together some paper and pens we can use for this job.”

“What sort of words do you think we will need?”

Children make suggestions – write them down on a board, helping them with the spelling etc. Talk about making the words very clear, possibly using capitals and exclamation marks.

Co-construction

Children work together, alone and/or with an adult to make the signs.

Adults support and help.

The children start sticking the signs up around the room in places where they think the goats will best see them.

Evaluation & Reflection

An adult-in-role (AIR) as the a goat (not pretending to be a goat) and, possibly, a child-in-role as the Troll, sitting and watching.

AIR comes in, looks around and sees the posters, she reads one out loud and then moves onto the next. We watch.

AIR decides the bridge is too dangerous and moves away. The troll goes hungry.

Talk to the students, “What did you notice?”

“It looks as though the signs worked.”

“What did we do that made them work so well?”

“How did we do that?”

“Did you see anyone today doing some work that impressed you?”

“We must be the kind of people who…”

Further activity

“I wonder if there are any other stories where we could use our signs to warn people?”

In this example the context makes the activity both urgent and important. This creates purpose, meaning and tension. The tension is something we feel because the activity needs to be done quickly and properly or it won’t work.

The purpose of the reflection at the end of the session is to focus the children not just on what was learnt specifically, but what the activity and the way they worked says about them as learners: Their shared knowledge, their skills, their qualities and their values.

Working in this way can help the children to become more focused on the activity (and the learning they are developing) and less on themselves (their needs and personal interests). The urgent/important table can be used as a planning and lesson evaluation tool, but it is also a heuristic model for thinking about learning and where the children (as learners) are putting their energy and time. I now share it with my class and use it to help the students evaluate their own dispositions. If I spot someone slipping into quadrant 4 it is usually enough to remind them of the purpose of this time and what to focus on, “This is a learning time, that conversation is for the playground, do you need any help or can you manage this yourself?”

Reflecting in this way can help the students develop both a language for learning and a heuristic model for thinking about how they are spending their time and to what ends.

I now start every new year with the question, “Why are we here, what is the purpose of school?” This becomes the main inquiry question that focuses the children’s learning throughout the different subjects and curriculum areas they study. Shaping and changing the way learning happens in the classroom and how the students reflect on their own learning and the goals they set for themselves. As well as teaching all the knowledge I can, helping them acquire the skills they need and develop deep understanding of the themes we study, my overarching concern is to strengthen and develop the children’s attitudes and dispositions to learning. To think of themselves as learners, responsible and focused on their own development. In this way, I hope they will become experts inlearning – not passengers on a train, marking time.

I use this adapted model of the ‘urgent/important’ heuristic with students:

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/making-learning-urgent-and-important/feed/7Kindertransporthttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/kindertransport/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/kindertransport/#commentsWed, 04 Sep 2013 11:55:00 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=944Author: Emma BramleyTheme: World War TwoAge Range: KS2Main Curriculum Focus: History, LiteracyExpert Team: Children’s Authors and PublishersClient(s): The Information CentreCommission: To create a children’s book which will tell the story of the evacuation of children from Prague to Britain in the lead up to World War Two

Context: In the lead up to World War Two Nicolas Winton was personally responsible for organising the transportation of 669 Jewish children to be transported from Czechoslovakia to Britain and other countries. He organized their train passage as well as foster care families to look after them however the last train he organized never left Prague as war was declared. Nicholas (Nicky) kept all of this a secret and it wasn’t until his wife found an old suitcase containing information about the children that his act was discovered and his achievements were recognised. ‘Kindertransport’ is the name that was collectively given to these children.

The Information Center (part of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) in Berlin has recognised that their exhibition doesn’t cater for children. They want to create a story book that tells the story of the Jewish refugee children that were taken to England, from Prague, by Nicholas Winton. They ask a group of children’s authors and illustrators to create a series of books that will appeal to children but also inform them of the story of Kindertransport.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/09/kindertransport/feed/0Planning for The Romans KS2 – Curriculum 2014http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/planning-for-the-romans-ks2-curriculum-2014/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/planning-for-the-romans-ks2-curriculum-2014/#commentsTue, 27 Aug 2013 15:15:21 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=936This blog is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the magazine, Creative Teaching and Learning in Spring 2013 and is reprinted here with their kind permission. It outlines the first steps into an imaginative-inquiry context that could be used as a topic for a Key Stage 2 class studying the Roman invasions and settlement. The full planning for this Unit can be found on the Planning section of our website. I have updated it for this blog, including the new Programmes of Study for Curriculum 2014.

This unit, The Roman Box, uses the mantle of the expert approach.

Mantle of the expert has always been an enigmatic approach, not least because of its name, which is hardly catchy, but also because it seems to contradict many preconceptions of how a classroom should operate. Some have called it nothing more than a drama convention, others like to label it as a return to progressive, laissez-faire education. The truth is mantle of the expert resists easy analysis and is difficult to pigeon-hole. It is based on an understanding that knowledge, skills and in-depth understanding are acquired, applied and developed in meaningful contexts that become familiar to the students over time.

On the surface it seems quite straight-forward:

establish an imaginary context,

in which the children work as a team of experts,

for a client who commissions the team to complete various tasks,

that create opportunities for curriculum teaching and learning.

However, underlying this simple structure is a sophisticated pedagogic approach that incorporates drama and inquiry to create multilayered narrative threads, complex power relationships and dynamic learning opportunities.

This article is a step-by-step plan setting up an imaginative-inquiry context. It starts with a straight-forward inquiry using a painting to establish the historical background to the work. This creates an opportunity for the class to step back into the past and into the world of the context through the use of various drama conventions. Finally the article outlines how to build an expert team using the children’s ideas and knowledge.

The imaginary context begins with a farmer finding of an ancient Roman security box while tending his field. The box has lain undiscovered for 2,000 years, originally buried during the Iceni revolt following the Roman invasions of AD43. By using the box as a bridge into history the context is further developed by the children recreating the dramatic events surrounding its burial. It then returns back to the present as the children adopt the expert point of view as a team of archaeologists, working first outside the fiction to invent the objects hidden in the box and then working inside the fiction as the team interpreting the objects historical meaning.

To make the planning steps easier to follow I’ve divided them up into three discrete sections of approximately one hour each. These can be taught either separately or continuously. Once the context is established it can then be used to create opportunities for learning across the curriculum. On the full planning page you can find both a Pdf and an editable Word copy of the planning. The Pdf copy includes a mind-map detailing some of the suggested cross-curricular links and activities that can be developed using this context.

Session 1 – The Painting: Introducing the Romans and Celts

Resources:

Painting of ‘Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar” (1899), Lionel Royer (see attached picture)

Post-it notes – different colours (for Step 4)

Topic box with books on the Romans and Iceni

For many of the students in your class this might be the first time they have studied the Romans and the Celts. It is likely some of them will have a bit of background knowledge, but for others it will be an entirely new subject. As a teacher I resist as much as possible telling kids stuff. For one reason, it’s too easy for them. For the second, I’ve noticed they don’t really listen until they are interested. When I’m starting a new area of study I concentrate first on getting them actively engaged in the subject, asking questions, making connections, and drawing conclusions. Once this happens then they a more likely to be receptive to new information.

To make this work I need to choose a resource that will grab their attention and, at the same time, give them a wealth of new information. Stories can sometimes do this, film, photographs, and first-person interactions with an adult-in-role. These are all useful strategies but for this context I’ve chosen a painting, ‘Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar” by Lionel Royer painted in 1899. I like this painting a great deal because it is full of dramatic tension and captures wonderfully the moment of triumph and defeat that lies at the heart of the Roman invasions. However, it does have drawbacks. The first, and most obvious, is it was painted nearly 2,000 years after the events and is merely an artist’s interpretation. The second is the Celts in the painting are a different tribe from the Iceni, in a different country. Nevertheless, the painting’s advantages (in my opinion) outweigh its disadvantages and I’ve used it many times with children of different ages who have all found it stimulating and exciting.

The following steps are a detailed outline of how I use this painting as the centre of an inquiry. My aims are:

To engage the children in the context of the painting

To give them time and opportunity to study it without being told what it is about

To let them ask questions, make guesses and discuss possibilities

To encourage them to make inferences and deductions and to begin to draw conclusions

To give them new and detailed information (at the end) about the people and cultures depicted in the painting

Step 1:Looking at the painting

‘I’d like to show you a painting. It’s quite an old painting, but not as old as the events it portrays. When you look at it could I ask you first just to say what you notice.’

The students might try to guess what is happening in the painting. If they do, acknowledge their efforts but ask them to hold back on those thoughts for a while and just to describe what they can see as accurately as possible. Sometimes this can take a little while, but it is an important step because you want them to really ‘look’ at the painting and not yet start interpreting it.

“Hold on to those thoughts for just a moment, we will becoming back to them very quickly, but just for now can you say only what you can see. For example – I can see a man on a horse pointing empty handed to the floor towards a pile of weapons.”

As the students work help them to use precise language, as if they were describing the events in a book, without the reader seeing the painting.

Once you feel everything in the painting has been described (and before it becomes boring) move onto to the next step.

Step 2: Interpreting the painting

“In art nothing is included by accident. This is not a photograph of the event, but a painting, made hundreds of years later. The artist has thought carefully about every tiny detail and what it might mean to a person looking at it. For example, what do you make of this man kneeling here with his arms tied behind his back?”

Give the students time to talk and build on each other’s ideas. Try not to do too much of the work for them and keep back your own knowledge; let them speculate for the time being. It will be a good opportunity for you to find out what they already know. Ask questions to help them dig a bit deeper and make connections. Keep the language speculative…

“Um, I see. So you think this man might be the king’s brother. Is he hoping to free him do you think?” etc.

Step 3: Giving some background

Once the inquiry has developed it is likely the children will be ready for some answers…

“If it will help I can tell you something about this painting. It was actually painted in 1899 in France, nearly 2,000 years after the event. It depicts the surrender of a Celtic chieftain, called Vercingetorix (werkiŋˈɡetoriks – try www.howjsay.com for a pronunciation) who lead a revolt (a war) against Roman power. Here he is surrendering to the Roman Emperor, Julius Caesar. After this, he was imprisoned for five years, then paraded through Rome and finally executed.”

Give the students the opportunity to ask you questions. Be honest about what you don’t know and don’t make things up. It is important they can use you as an accurate historical resource. You can find all the information you need on Wikipedia.

Step 4: Reflection

For this next step you will need some post-it notes, ideally two different colours.

“So, what do we make of these people, the Celts and the Romans? I’m wondering if by looking at the painting, the way they are dressed, their weapons, their banners and everything else, we might be able to say something about them as different cultures. For example, what about the different shapes of their shields and their motifs?”

Your aim is to begin a discussion about the contrast between the straight, angular, lines of the Roman designs and the more rounded, organic, shapes of the Celts. Encourage the students to ask questions and make inferences about the two different cultures and what was important to them as people.

Finally, use the post-it notes to work with the students to collect their thoughts. On one colour ask them to write the things they know (or might know) about the Celts and the Romans. On the other, to write questions they would like to know more about. You could also introduce them to the topic books as they work, putting them out onto the tables – “You might find these useful…”

By the end of this session you are likely to have the makings of quick wall display with a copy of the painting surrounded by different coloured post-it notes recording the children’s new knowledge and questions.

Session 2: The Roman Box: Stepping back into history

Some large sheets of sugar paper (to write down key questions and ideas)

Stack of A5 paper (for the children to use)

An adult in role (AIR) (in Step 4)

Step 1.The farmer finds the chest

Gather the class round a large sheet of sugar paper. Start drawing the outline of the box (a large rectangular shape). At the same time tell the following story:

“I’d like to tell you about something that was found in a field… it was found by a farmer, who was out ploughing one early morning. He was driving his tractor when the plough caught something hard. He knew a sound like that could spell trouble (a broken blade or something) so he jumped out of his cab and rushed round the back of the tractor to have a look. There, after he cleared away some of the earth, was a very curious thing. A large metal box buried deep in the ground, you can see the size of it, a large metal box with a curious lid. (Start drawing the two handles) The lid had two metal handles, that looked like this… he tried to turn them, but couldn’t, that had to be done later at the museum, after the box was carefully lifted out of the ground and washed clean.”

Step 2. Speculation

‘I’ll show you how the opening mechanism worked.” (Lean over the box and ‘grab’ the handles, turn them simultaneously. Show them again, and then sit back. The children might like to have a go.) “Clearly whoever put things in this box, must have thought a lot of them…’

Wait a moment and see if the students say anything. If they’re getting interested they might start making some suggestions.

Give them a little time to think, if they don’t start to speculate then guide them along, however try to avoid leading them or being ‘teachery’.

‘Someone obviously went to a lot of trouble, this box is very heavy and why would they want to bury it? When they cleared off the mud the archaeologists found wonderful engravings, carved into sides. This was not something you would want hidden in the ground.’

This is a sort of ‘fishing’ exercise. You are not after the right answer, you just want to draw the children out, giving them time and opportunity to speculate. Don’t worry if their ideas seem unlikely or fanciful, as the story-teller you can always get the narrative back on track and if someone does start to make the right connections then you have the perfect in.

Step 3. The Roman villa

“There was something else the archaeologists uncovered when they examined the site where the box was found. After some more digging they found the ruins of a Roman villa, not much left now, but what there was showed signs of fire damage. It is possible the villa was completely destroyed by fire.”

Again, give the students time to talk and speculate. Go carefully, this is all about negotiation and judging the right moment, the students don’t want to feel as though you are playing them along. They might start to join everything up, but don’t be disappointed if they don’t.

Step 4. Burying the chest

Up until now you have been holding back on information (in the same way you did with the painting inquiry) giving the children the opportunity to ask questions, make connections and imagine possible events. In this next step you will use an adult in role (AIR) to shift the inquiry from the classroom space into an imaginary historical space and build a contextual inquiry through the use of dramatic conventions.

“I just going to ask Mrs Brown if she would help us out. What we would like to see Mrs Brown is the moment just after the box was buried, but before the villa was burnt down. Obviously the people who burnt down the villa didn’t discover the box, because its here! But there might have been a moment when they were outside trying to get in. We’d like you to help us with that.

OK we’re just going to watch as Mrs Brown gets ready.

The adult then takes a position crouched on the floor, next to the box, her head down. This is a convention of drama where the role is depicted as frozen in time, like in a painting or a statue. The children have permission to stare and make observations and the role will not react.

After the class have had time to talk and the time is right you can bring the role to life with a touch on the shoulder. Starting a new convention where the person in role will listen and respond as if they can hear what the children are saying even though they are not with them. The children themselves are outside the fiction looking in, the convention gives them the opportunity to question the person inside the fiction without having to participate. It is an extremely useful teaching strategy as it allows the person in role to give important information (including curriculum knowledge) to the class without it feeling like a lesson.

Through this process the AIR should convey the following information:

The house is being attacked and they are outside, she can hear them thumping on the door, screaming.

They’re climbing on the roof. There’s no way out.

When asked she should tell the children the attackers call themselves the Iceni and give them some information, she might apologise for not knowing much.

She has buried the box to protect the things inside. They are precious, family things, and she doesn’t want the barbarians getting hold of them.

Her husband is a general in the Roman army, he is away fighting the war, and her eldest son is with him.

Step 5. The children step in to the fiction

In this next step you will use a further convention to help the children step into the fiction, joining the woman either as members of her household or as the Iceni warriors outside.

Start by addressing the woman in the story: ‘Thank you, I think we have taken enough of your time.’

AIR returns to the still-frame, head bowed. ‘You know rich Romans were rarely alone. They had large households of servants and slaves, she might even have had other children with her at this time. If you would like to be in this picture as one of these people then we could make that happen. Is there anyone who would like to represent one of her family?’

Be careful to take this slowly. As each of the volunteers makes themselves known ask them to say who they are and to join the AIR in the picture. Ask the rest of the class to watch and interpret their choice of actions. Are they standing close? Are they worried about themselves more than the woman? Are they being protective? Etc. In this way the children will create a tableau, a moment trapped in time, just before the Iceni broke into the house and these people’s lives were changed forever.

It is unlikely all the children will volunteer to be members of the household and you will be left with a group sitting and watching those now in role. These will soon join the fiction, but be careful they might be a bit worried about being stared at. Make sure the students feel safe and protected. The aim is to have everyone involved, but not scared.

Ask those sitting outside the fiction to please stand. ‘This is the story of the night the box was buried in the ground. Desperately those people of the Roman household hid away their most precious objects in the near and certain knowledge that they would never see them again. Outside the house, the Iceni warriors – fierce and angry – gathered, preparing to break in. Watching from the shadows were the Roman people’s neighbours, terrified it would be their turn next.’

The remaining children can now choose between representing either the Iceni warriors or the neighbours of the Roman family. Allow them the opportunity to change role if they want to at any time.

Give the children time to decide where to stand. Gather together those representing the Iceni warriors. Hand them each a flaming brand. ‘We are here because we have been driven here. We didn’t choose this. We didn’t ask the Romans to take our land, enslave our people, steal our food. Each of us must protect our queen, protect our land, take this burning flame and be ready.’

Be careful not to let things rush ahead at this point. Step outside the fiction and talk to the children.

‘I wonder what the Iceni warriors shouted?’ They were angry. Terrible things had been done to them, to their people, to their queen. But the people in this house aren’t soldiers, they are ordinary people, children and servants, try and hold the moment to give the class the opportunity to think and reflect. Remember they are representing the people in the fiction, not being them. This is a chance for the children to experience in a small way something of what it might have been like, but they do not have to agree with the actions the Iceni took.

‘I wonder which one of us will be the first to light the fire? Be careful, don’t do this lightly… whoever it is will carry the burden for the rest of their lives, there are women and children in this household, innocents. And slaves who have chosen to die with their Roman masters… I wonder if there are any among us who have doubts?’

‘Two thousand years later we know the Iceni did it, [Note, the shift in language to distance the students from the action] we can see the evidence, and I doubt they would ever admit it, but in their own hearts, some of the warriors might have been reluctant about doing this, to innocent people, this is not noble, not the same as facing your enemies. Looking them in the eye. I wonder what happened to them to make them do such a terrible thing? To act in such a terrible way.’

Here is a chance to hear from the Iceni. Again hold the moment using convention and ask the warriors for their voices. You might want to structure it by using a line which all the warriors can repeat, something like: “I am here…”

– “I am here to avenge my family.”

– “I am here because the Romans burnt our crops.”

– “I am here to kill the invaders.”

“And what did the neighbours do? Were there any among them brave enough to speak out? To try and stop what was happening in front of them?”

Throughout this inquiry give help and support to the students and give them opportunities to help and support each other. The idea is not too ‘load’ them with the guilt of the people they represent, but rather to create a dramatic situation that will create different points of view and different attitudes. The use of the conventions can help the students to pull back from the events themselves and to re-interpret them from the distance of history.

Step 7. Reflection

Once the dramatic-inquiry is over bring everyone together again.

“What did you make of that? Did it have a sense of authenticity? I mean could you imagine it happening?

“What did you make of the Iceni warriors? And the neighbours, I wonder if there was anything they could have done?

Gather the class together. Put the picture of the box on the floor. “I wondering what it’s like opening something like this for the first time in 2,000 years…

Give the students time to think and talk. “I mean for the archaeologists, working in the museum. I guess for them its like a time capsule, something that is going to teach them new things about the past. I suppose some of the things in this box will be familiar, but others might be completely original, the first (or should I say, last) of their kind…

“What do you think? I mean, if we were the archaeology team, what do think might be in here? I’m guessing not just gold. When we heard from the lady who buried it, she didn’t say treasure, she said precious. Precious I suppose means something different in this context. I remember her saying they were important things, important to her and her family because they held memories and she didn’t want the barbarians getting their hands on them.”

“And they would be precious to us as well, as the archaeologists… but in a different way.”

All along during this monologue it is important to be slow and thoughtful, as if the thoughts are just coming to you as you speak. Be patient and give opportunities for the students join in with thoughts and ideas of their own.

“We’ll have to wear our gloves. If the box is air tight, the artefacts won’t have been exposed to any air for 2,000 years. If we are very lucky there might even be some surviving parchment… Have you got your cameras ready? After we take the objects out, one at a time, they will have to be photographed and researched…”

Pick up the A5 paper and start handing it out…

‘You can use this paper to draw pictures of the things you find. Please use the books here (point to the topic books) to help with your research. You might find some of the objects within their pages.’

Step 9. Research

You will need a selection of books and pictures out on the tables. There are many good topic books on the Romans, but you might also want to make up a collection of fact sheets.

Repeat as you hand out the (A5) paper: “Please take of these, for the photographs, you might find the books on the tables useful. Could you please make a drawing of the photograph of the object you are looking at from the box. Please include as much detail as you can. We don’t want to miss anything important…”

As the student’s start to work, help them out where needed. Try and hold the fiction, as much as possible, although you might need to step out of role if you have a child who is really unsure. “Um, have you looked in the books? You might find something that looks like one of the objects from the box in one of those. If you do then a quick sketch would be very helpful.”

Remember the students are authoring and inventing, not pretending to be archaeologists. As they work extend their thinking; “Would you mind please writing next to your photograph what the object is and what (if any) use it had.”

Once the objects are drawn collect them together on the evidence table. You can extend this activity by creating (with the students) the other tools and equipment used by the team. Alternatively, you could bring in real equipment: gloves, tweezers, magnifying glass etc.

Provide some feedback and invite thinking. Remember, this is not ‘show and tell’ and try not to praise. Try to find the language ‘inside’ the fiction. It’s often worth practicing before hand. Something like, “There is more here than we could have ever hoped for. And so varied. Some of these artefacts are beautiful, look at this ring for example, and others just plain and ordinary, like this child’s wooden toy. What’s clear is there is a real mystery at the heart of all this. Why put all these objects in a security box and bury it in the ground? Do you think they meant to come back for them? They must have been important… but why?”

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/planning-for-the-romans-ks2-curriculum-2014/feed/1Thirteen things I try to remember at the start of a new yearhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/thirteen-things-i-try-to-remember-at-the-start-of-a-new-year/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/thirteen-things-i-try-to-remember-at-the-start-of-a-new-year/#commentsMon, 26 Aug 2013 15:39:13 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=9201. Learn the children’s names as quickly as you can – use mnemonics and include the students in the process. Ask for their help.
2. Share your thinking with them – ask them about the layout of the room, the resources, the tables etc. Its their place of work as well as yours.
3. Set clear expectations and explain why. “This is a place for learning, there’s a lot of us and if its going to work well then we all have to do our bit.”
4. Include yourself – “I’ll remind you if you forget and I’ll do my best to plan lessons that will be interesting. Sometimes though learning means doing things that are a bit boring, I can’t help that. But I promise I won’t ever waste your time and I’ll always explain why I’m asking you to do something.”
5. Explain that different kinds of learning require different kinds of behaviour – concentrated thinking (reading, writing etc) needs a quiet/silent room; a classroom discussion needs people to listen and speak one at a time; building and making activities need people to work together and share resources etc… I use this poster as a reminder.
7. Only shout in an emergency. Children hate shouting and its a sign you’ve lost control. If a teacher shouts for strategic reasons then its a bad strategy.
8. Nevertheless, be firm and consistent. Children don’t like teachers who vacillate.
9. Be fair. If you didn’t see what happened, then say so. Listen to both sides and work together to find a solution. Don’t be influenced by children’s reputations.
10. Avoid becoming the classroom (playground) problem-solver. Talk to the children about how they can solve their own problems and how they don’t always need an adult to help them. When things go wrong they can ask themselves:

Is this something I can sort out myself?

Is this something I need an adult to help me with?

Is this something I need an adult to deal with?

11. Share your assessment criteria with the class. Put it on the wall and give the children time to assess their own work. I use a scale 1 – 5 (with a description for each), 1 – terrible quality; 2 – poor quality; 3 – satisfactory; 4 – good; 5 – top quality. I made this one for my Year 2 Class.
12. Where possible, plan activities in a meaningful and engaging context. Not all the curriculum can be taught in this way, but when it is, it is much more effective. See the planning resources here.
13. Smile. As often as you can. Its not a sign of weakness, the children appreciate it and you’ll find yourself enjoying it.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/thirteen-things-i-try-to-remember-at-the-start-of-a-new-year/feed/3Some thoughts on the Canonhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/some-thoughts-on-the-canon/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/some-thoughts-on-the-canon/#commentsFri, 16 Aug 2013 14:40:13 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=905This post is in response to @debrakidd and the very interesting discussion that followed. It was originally intended as a comment, but grew too long and became a blog.

The Canon, in the sense of: “A list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality” - has always seemed to be the province of those who might be described as conservatives (with a small c) or traditionalists. Those on the left or progressives have tended to dismiss the Canon as a list of ‘dead-white-men’.

Here is a video of two academic white-men from either side of this intellectual divide discussing the subject (with thanks to @SurrealAnarchy for sharing this link)

As their conversation moves on it becomes apparent they share a lot of common ground, most importantly they both believe there is such a thing as culture and it is possible to say what has value and what doesn’t, where they disagree is on how such a thing as a Canon might be agreed and what should and shouldn’t be included. The traditionalist (Roger Scruton) believes a Canon does exist and should be the bedrock of a liberal education, the progressive (Terry Eagleton) also believes the Canon exists but it is tainted by the conservative, intellectual elite that created it and should be deconstructed for its historical, political and class bias.

While I have sympathy for this last view – I certainly don’t trust the intellectual, political and economic elite – I also have great sympathy for the traditionalist view that works of great value should be studied and appreciated both in school and in society. The problem with the progressive argument is that it basically deals itself out of the game. By refusing to engage in the discussion of what should be included, the progressive does not prevent the discussion happening and the Canon being established, but merely decides not to be included.

This seems to me a very big mistake.

By not engaging in the debate, other than to say the debate is not worth having, seems to me like intellectual sulking. And the progressives can hardly complain if the Canon is made up of ‘dead-white-men’ if they have just left it to the ‘alive-white-men’ to create it.

To enter the debate seems far more constructive. Not that I expect it will be easy.

The first question is, ‘who decides?’ I would argue everyone should have a voice and everyone should be involved in the final decision. Of course the problems with this approach are obvious and we could easily end up with sludge rather gold. But the alternatives are far worse, leaving it to intellectuals, journalists and (worst of all) politicians would be a disaster.

Does this mean Wayne Rooney gets the same vote as Prof. David Starkey? Yes, and Starkey would just have to get over it. My point is not that everyone knows as much as everyone else, but that if the final decision is democratic than everyone who cares will have to make an argument strong enough to convince those that don’t. If Starkey wants Rooney’s vote for Der Ring des Nibelungen he will have to convince him that it is better than Agadoo.

This means education.

I’m being very rude about Rooney (for all I know he might love Wagner) but most people would need convincing that 15 hours of German Opera is worth including as one of the human races’ greatest achievements. And that is absolutely right. If something is genuinely of the highest value then it should be able to stand on its own two feet, it should be possible for those who know why, to explain to those who don’t, why it is so important. I’m not saying they have to like it, but they should be able to appreciate it. If they don’t, it doesn’t belong in the Canon.

This is my current attitude to Jane Austen. I don’t like her, I find her boring and her books are full of people I don’t care about. However, I have been convinced (by people who know and care a lot more than I do) that she is a great and important literary figure. So, should she go into the Canon? Absolutely, she has my vote.

What about Dostoyevsky? Yep. Simone de Beauvoir? She has my vote. The Bhagavad Gita? Definitely. This is easy. Billy Holiday? Eh, yes, although I guess some would argue. Ok, how about The Beatles, Jack Kerouac, Hilary Mantel and Mondrian?

I said it wasn’t going to be easy. But I think we should welcome the discussion. At the moment the debate is marginalised – a sort of intellectual bun-fight between those on the right who say ‘Canon good’ and those on the left who say ‘Canon bad’. I believe we should drag this debate out of the shadows and on to BBC 1 at 7 O’clock on a Saturday night, every week for a year. It can be hosted by Bruce Forsyth and accompanied by the BBC Big Band, I don’t care, but lets have this fight out in the open. So what if the viewing figures don’t stack up against the X-Factor. I believe if Shostakovich is so blooming good, he’ll eventually win out against a singing dog.

At the end of the year we’ll have a vote and that will become the Canon for the next year. Then we will start the whole process all over again. To start with, I guess, it might be a bit hit and miss, but over time the cream will rise and it won’t be all old and white, it will include all different shades of colour and style.

Call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one (although I probably am on this one). Isn’t education about the journey rather than the destination? Isn’t it better to have strived and failed, than to have never tried at all? Isn’t it the purpose of education to travel not in faith, but in hope?

*At this point the speaker fell of his soapbox and into the road. There was a suggestion someone pushed him.*

For a long while now, delivery has been the accepted analogy for curriculum design and teaching. First appearing in the educational lexicon about the same time as the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in the early years of the Labour Government, it soon became the go-to metaphor for anyone talking about the teaching and learning process in the late 90s.

As a technical term, however, it is deeply flawed and fails to capture the multifaceted complexity of its subject. Teachers are not postal workers delivering knowledge like parcels from the page to the brain and children minds are not passive open-mouthed letterboxes, waiting for learning to be dropped in.

Metaphors matter and the way we talk about a subject, influences the way we think about it. Of course, ‘delivering’ the curriculum is as much a cliché as ‘discovery’ learning and most schools use a variety of different approaches. Nevertheless, it has become so ubiquitous and firmly entrenched that it is very rarely questioned or challenged. It is not unusual to hear educators talking about ‘delivering the curriculum’ or ‘delivering a lesson’, or even ‘delivering a great lesson’ (which must be close to an oxymoron), without much thought into what this actually means. It even crops up in the writing of education bloggers, who are otherwise very careful about their use of words. For Orwell it would constitute a ‘flyblown metaphor’ used so lazily that it no longer has any real meaning and should be consigned to the dustbin.

I’ve hated it from the first time I heard it used at a curriculum design meeting run by the Local Authority after the publication of Curriculum 2000. It filled me instantly with horror implying, as it does, the objectification of both adults and children in the teaching and learning process. It represented what I disliked about the Literacy Hour, a single method, universally applied, where teachers only had to follow the procedure for students to learn efficiently.

The problem with delivery methods in education is that they are impersonal, designed, as they must be, away from the classrooms where they will be used. Classrooms are a dynamic learning environment, by that I mean the adults and the children working in that space have their own motivations, interests, and levels of expertise. They react in response to the subject matter and methods being used, and the teacher is wise to adapt their own responses accordingly. For these reasons we should be wary of prescriptive strategies or teaching methods that claim to be the best way for children to learn. In my mind, it always depends on what children are in the room. Some children need more structure, others need more practice, some need an overview, and others like to find out for themselves. The teacher’s job is to plan and teach the methods that have the most effective outcomes, irrespective of what the experts say.

The problem with experts is that their opinion varies over time and has direct impact on what we do and don’t do in the classroom, here are three examples:

Ten years ago the received wisdom was that every lesson had to start with the children being told the Learning Objective. These were often written on the board and students spent five or ten minutes (depending on their skills) at the start of the lesson writing them into their books. Now we are told that this is not best practice and the LO can be shared at any time.

The new orthodoxy has it that Teacher Talk is a bad thing. As a consequence many teachers are told to limit their TT to a minimum. Lesson observations are focused on how much time the teacher talks (as they were ten years ago on LOs) and skilled teachers feel their professional expertise is under attack.

In the New Curriculum phonics is a prescribed method for teaching reading. From September 2014 every Primary School in the country is legally required to use phonics.

In my opinion forcing schools to adopt a prescribed method is always a bad idea (even if the idea itself is not bad) however the prescription of phonics is of a different order to what we have seen before and represents a serious erosion of our professional independence. Pedagogy has always been the prerogative of teachers and schools. Even the Literacy Hour was a non-statutory method, never a legal requirement. As far as I know, the requirement to teach phonics is the first time a single pedagogical method has been enshrined in law.

Some might feel I’m making a fuss about nothing, but these things are important. Teaching is a profession; it takes time and practice to do well. Pedagogy is not a simple matter of wrapping up parcels and delivering them to the right address, it is a complex and difficult process that takes many years to master. Using the right words to describe what we do is important, protecting our professional standing is important, and so is resisting those who tell us how to do our job.

In Chapter 3 Hirsch tackles the subject of developing knowledge of language. He starts by making an uncontroversial assertion, “every effort should be made to make vocabulary building in school as effective as possible.” (p.59) But then cautions us that developing language is far from straight-forward, “how we do it remains something of a mystery.” (p.59)

It seems, drawing on the theories of Steven Pinker (mentioned in the previous blog on Hirsch), that developing language requires quite different teaching strategies to the ones used to develop decoding/encoding skills, “The consensus of all researchers is that indirect, implicit learning is by far the main mode of increasing one’s vocabulary… there is a big psychological difference between learning word meaning and learning how to decode the sounds of letters… we humans don’t possess a built-in alphabet-phoneme-mapping faculty but we do possess a built-in word-meaning-learning faculty.” (p.62-64)

By ‘implicit’ Hirsch means, “It appears that we have a remarkable innate faculty for learning word meanings in context.” (p.63)

Therefore, “we learn words up to four times faster in a familiar than in an unfamiliar context… ensuring topics of reading and discussion are consistent over several class periods, so the topic becomes familiar to the students.” (p.60)

Concluding, “How astonishing, then if it should turn out that the most efficient way of learning thousands of word meanings is through an unconscious, automatic and implicit process. Yet the weight of evidence indicates so. The proponents of naturalism in learning are not always wrong, it appears. It depends on what is to be learnt.” (p.63)

And, “It’s clear that a sparing use of well-contextualised explicit meaning instruction is useful for vocabulary gain. More extended explicit word study is probably inefficient in the long run.” (p.66)

Thoughts

I’ve read through this chapter several times because I do not want to mis-represent Hirsch’s meaning. He seems to be saying that schools should be using a mixed approach, where they use explicit instruction and focused practice for developing decoding and encoding skills and a completely different, ‘implicit’, approach for developing language and knowledge.

And, this implicit approach is something advocated by the “proponents of naturalism” who, it seems, “are not always wrong”. Because, “It depends on what is to be learnt.”

This conclusion is so good I’m going to repeat it, in bold, and underlined: “It depends on what is to be learnt.” E.D. Hirsch, ‘The Knowledge Deficit’ p.63)

I read something similar last week, “think in terms of education itself rather than in terms of some ‘ism’ about education… For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism’ becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms’ that it is unwillingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems and possibilities.” (J. Dewey, ‘Experience and Education’ p.2)

As I said yesterday, most academics writing about education walk a centre path. Dogmatic polarisation serves no one and is the domain of demagogues. It is my view we should avoid those that would push us to the edges and reduce our professional options, these idealists are zealots for their own cause and unresponsive to reason and evidence. Hirsch is clearly not among them.

Hirsch’s approach is far more pragmatic and evidence focused, and for these reasons it sounds more plausible, familiar and useful. He is advocating a mixture of teaching strategies which are flexible and responsive to the way student’s learn best. Explicit instruction when this is most effective, implicit instruction at other times.

Implicit instruction involves students acquiring, applying and developing knowledge and understanding in a range of activities using familiar contexts that extend over time, such as speaking and listening.

From a primary teacher’s perspective this sounds like good sound advice.

Notes on using conventions, contexts and stories:

Hirsch believes that in order to develop the necessary levels of knowledge and skills for high level comprehension children need to understand the complex system of conventions that good readers and writers acquire over time.

Conventions are rules by which language and meaning are conveyed between people, either through spoken language or written words. Conventions are difficult to understand outside of the context they are used and so children need many different examples and situations to see and use the conventions in order to develop a good understanding.

Hirsch recommends using two interlinking approaches:

Reading ‘stories’ to children (these can be fiction or non-fiction – teaching subjects in non-fiction through the use of story where possible), followed by questioning and discussion from a young age. Children can understand far more than they can read and speaking and listening is a critical element in developing knowledge, vocabulary and understanding of the conventions.

Using ‘pretend’ situations for children to practice reading, writing and speaking in standard code. “In the classroom, the teacher can and should ask children frequently to make formal prepared and unprepared presentations to the class… like pretend radio.” (p.31)

Hirsch is clear that the learning of new vocabulary and knowledge is done much more efficiently in contexts familiar to the children:

“we learn words up to four times faster in a familiar than in an unfamiliar context… An optimal learning program will exploit this characteristics of word learning by ensuring that the topics of reading and discussion are consistent over several class periods, so the topic becomes familiar to the students.” (p.60)

Further, these topics must be relevant (to the children’s learning) and useful: The knowledge children develop in these topics must be “the kind of knowledge that proficient readers and writers actually use.” (p.76) Core knowledge from history, science and the arts.

Hirsch also makes a strong case for using stories, “Stories are indeed the best vehicles for teaching young children – an idea that was ancient when Plato reasserted it in Republic.” (p.78)

However, Hirsch is quick to stress he is not talking about trivial nonsense (which is often found in young children’s reading materials, but proper, challenging material, useful to children’s education: “But stories are not necessarily the same things as ephemeral fictions. Many an excellent story is told about real people and events, and even stories that are fictional take much of their worth from the nonfictional truths about the world that they convey. (p.78)

Thoughts

By this later stage in the book Hirsch is becoming less polemic. His tone softens and as a reader I felt much less ‘battered’ by his argument.

This more conciliatory style might explain why these dimensions of Hirsch’s philosophy have been played down in the commentaries, “Hirsch advocates mixed teaching approach” is not a very provocative headline.

However, I found his ideas in this section interesting and useful. In particular he stresses the importance of teaching through stories. This is not, as he says, a new idea but it is an idea that is becoming very widely accepted among academics in both education and science. The best explanation I’ve read for why stories are so effective as teaching tools is from Kieran Egan, although Daniel Willingham writes about it very convincingly too. The telling, listening to and creation of stories it seems is an ancient and extremely effective method for developing children’s knowledge and understanding and teachers should use stories regularly to teach the curriculum.

Further, stories should be used to create familiar contexts for learning that develop learning opportunities for students over time,

“Suppose you are reading to five-year-old Dmitri a story about kings and queens. If you extend that topic for the next few days by reading more true and fictional stories about kings and queens and how they lived, and what they did, the chances are that Dmitri will increase his general knowledge and vocabulary faster than if you read about zebras the next day, Laplanders the day after that and so on. Clearly a good way to induce fast vocabulary gain for children is to stay on a subject long enough for the general topic to become familiar. This is yet another reason that a coherent, content-orientated curriculum is the most effective way to raise reading achievement.” (p.81)

I’m not sure there is a primary teacher alive who wouldn’t support this philosophy. In fact, it sounds very familiar.

Over the last two or three years E.D. Hirsch, a retired Professor of Education and Humanities from Virginia, USA, and his ideas on why American education doesn’t work, have become a cause célèbre. He is considered, depending on your point of view, either an inspirational guru of great insight or a pantomime villain with dangerously reactionary views.

In my experience academics writing about education are rarely extremists, they are usually thoughtful and careful about their conclusions and tend to walk the centre line. Hirsch, despite the hype, is no exception.

His ‘hardline neoconservative’ reputation is probably due in large part to his theory that American education has been ruined by a series of damaging ideas originating from the work of Rousseau and the Romantics, and disseminated by Progressive educationalists such as Dewey. This theory he outlines in strident fashion in Chapter 1: ‘Why Do We Have a Knowledge Deficit?”

To be honest I found this part of his book unconvincing and a bit off-putting, I’m not keen on polemics and I don’t like being told what to think, especially if I detect the author is trying to claim special abilities because of his expert knowledge, “My academic specialties thus freed me to think in new ways about what has gone wrong in our schools” (p.6).

I find this sort of thing the intellectual equivalent of, “Trust me, I’m a doctor” and it always has the opposite effect on me.

For these reasons I’m going to skip over the first chapter and only concentrate on those parts of the book that are worth considering from a teaching perspective.

Before I start it is worth pointing out a couple of things. The first is that the book is mainly about the teaching of literacy in Primary education. It does have some application for Secondary, but the examples that illustrate Hirsch’s argument are all from the teaching of young children.

The second is that Hirsch, in common with many academics who don’t teach, is strong on ideas (although not all his ideas are strong), but weak on practice. Sometimes the teaching activities he recommends sound naive, even quaint – such as young children pretending to be radio announcers to practice their standard English – and is not at all clear if he has much, or even any, recent and relevant teaching experience at Primary age. Which is a shame, because this knowledge deficit (see what I did there?) seriously weakens his argument.

Notes on the human mind and language:

Although it takes a while for Hirsch to get there (page 64) the really important teaching idea in “The Knowledge Deficit” is Steven Pinker’s assertion that the human mind learns spoken language and written language in different ways.

The argument is that the human brain has evolved to make meaning of spoken language without the need for explicit instruction – children learn new vocabulary and knowledge in familiar contexts indirectly through tacit experience – but has not evolved to understand written language in the same way – the rules, codes and conventions of written language have to be taught more directly.

“A plausible explanation is that we humans don’t possess a built-in alphabet-phoneme-mapping faculty but we do possess a built-in word-meaning-learning faculty.” (p.64)

Thoughts:

This idea sounds plausible and scores highly both on my own experience of what works in the classroom and on future utility. I followed up the Pinker reference and read more about his theory on his website and I’ve ordered, “The Language Instinct” which will hopefully arrive in the next few days. His argument that human language has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, so humans have evolved innate language learning abilities, sounds convincing. As does, the reason we haven’t evolved the same innate abilities in reading and writing is because it is a much more recent invention, 5,000 – 6,000 years.

In an education context the theory strongly implies that different learning outcomes require different kinds of teaching:

Learning the skills of decoding and encoding for reading and writing require explicit instruction and extended practice using short focused activities.

Whereas, learning new knowledge and developing understanding requires implicit instruction in familiar contexts, over time, with students being active participants in the process of making meaning.

This is both a reassuring and useful conclusion because it matches very closely what I’m already doing in the classroom, while also giving me a new way to understand why this approach works and how to refine and make it better.

Pedagogically it makes sense and explains why children should experience a range of different activities during the school day, which will help them over time to develop different kinds of knowledge, skills and understanding.

I would be interested in developing a curriculum timetable that would create an effective and manageable teaching and learning structure based on these ideas.

Notes on children becoming effective readers;

The next ‘big’ idea in ‘The Knowledge Deficit’ is more about curriculum design.

“Reading comprehension requires prior ‘domain-specific’ knowledge about the things that a text refers to, and that understanding the text consists of integrating this prior knowledge with the words in order to form a ‘situation model’.” (p.17)

This means that children, to become effective readers, need to develop three interrelated forms of knowledge:

Decoding skills (this is a form of procedural knowledge, which Hirsch also calls a skill)

Knowledge of the language of standard-code (formal English, vocabulary and the conventions of spoken and written language)

Those children without knowledge of all three will be at a major disadvantage.

Thoughts:

I like this idea of the ‘situation model’. Hirsch is making an important point that reading comprehension is not the same as decoding and that children, even the ones who learn to decode well, can not necessarily read well unless they have knowledge of the subject.

This is an argument against ‘content light’ reading schemes and school curriculum where children spend their time learning formal skills without developing knowledge about the world. I’m in full agreement with this. It has been my experience that very young children even from nursery age are fully able to start learning information from different domains of knowledge; history, science, geography etc. (in ways that are meaningful and engaging to them) and that we do a great disservice to them if we waste their time on nonsense. Time is a precious commodity in schools and we should be using every moment as an opportunity to develop children’s knowledge and skills.

Further, Hirsch is very aware of the importance of spoken literacy in the development of domain knowledge and knowledge of the standard-code. Speaking and listening are a vital part of Hirsch’s curriculum and should, in his opinion, constitute a substantial part of the school day. He says children understand much more than they can read and although they should spend an appropriate amount of time reading and writing every day, the rest of the time should be used developing their knowledge and skills through activities that utilise speaking and listening.

Notes on decoding and encoding:

Although Hirsch stresses the importance of ‘persistent explicit instruction’ he is clear this should not be a tedious exercise in rote learning.

The best and fastest way to teach decoding is persistent explicit Instruction a little at a time

However, “Becoming a skilled decoder does not ensure that one will become a skilled reader” (p.24)

He recommends, “time spent on decoding and encoding (writing) skills should not exceed 30 to 45 minutes a day.” (p.81)

Thoughts

I can’t think of single primary school I have been to in the last ten years, and I’ve been to a lot, that has not been using phonics regularly and systematically as part of the way they teach reading and writing. This is not a new idea or one that has had trouble being adopted. In fact I remember the first school I worked in back in the early 90s, a school that placed a very high premium on creativity and was led by a headteacher immersed in ‘progressive’ education (she had a copy of the Plowden Report on her book shelf, next to a photo of A.S. Neill) that introduced phonics to the children from their first week in Reception.

The truth is phonics work for most children, most of the time, but not for all and, as Hirsch points out, being able to decode is not the same as being able to read. Let’s keep this all in perspective, phonics are not a silver bullet.

Notes on developing language & knowledge:

Apparently the teaching of knowledge explicitly has, for some, become a very bad thing. I’ve never actually met one of these people, but according to Hirsch and others, they have had a malicious stranglehold on US and UK education since the late 1960s. To be honest I don’t care much for this theory, nevertheless Hirsch has a point when he says knowing stuff is important.

The task of teaching decoding is different from developing language and knowledge, both are needed to develop comprehension, “the decoding task is absolutely essential, but as we’ve seen, it is a different task, and it is long-range one that should not hold back progress in language and knowledge.” (p.32)

A good early start in verbal knowledge and world knowledge important. Young children can understand much more than they can read and we must, therefore, spend large amounts of time reading aloud and discussing challenging material with children.

Children need to learn the core knowledge that aids reading comprehension, “We don’t need to teach the things that writers directly explain we need to teach what writers take granted and do not explain”

If there is shared knowledge all children must have it is our duty to determine what that knowledge is…and keep it safe from ideological and political controversy. (p44)

Hirsch is opposed to giving children ‘content free or light’ material to read, “I have no disagreement at all with the asking of why questions about substantive readings, however I disagree with reading with the little cumulative educational value on the principle that learning formal procedures is more important for future reading competency that the actual content being read.”(p49)

Thoughts

I really have no problem with the idea that children should be taught challenging, rich and useful knowledge from a range of domains using different teaching techniques from a young age. This just does not sound controversial to me.

However, the idea that there is a core of shared knowledge, which we can all agree on and keep free of dispute I’m not so sure about. The National Curriculum is the closest we have and the last review hardly seemed to be entirely free of ideological or political interference or go by without a hint of controversy.

Notes on learning formal language:

As well as a being familiar with a core of common knowledge, Hirsch also stresses the importance of children developing an understanding of the different codes and conventions of formal language and writing.

Children need to learn the difference between the elaborate code of ‘school speech’ (formal language) and the more familiar restricted code of ‘home speech’. School speech uses standard English and makes it clear that different forms of language are used in different places. Children need to learn when and where to use different language forms.

Further, these differences are transferred to writing, which uses a form of print code that relies on a shared body of background knowledge, vocabulary and understanding of an elaborate system of conventions.

Thoughts

For teachers interested in drama, the words code and convention have a special resonance and when Hirsch mentions them it is difficult not to be immediately reminded of the work of Dorothy Heathcote. Heathcote’s work, through drama for learning, focused on the use of sign and significance in social situations and her essay on sign, “Signs and Portents” in “Collected Writings on Education and Drama” is one of the seminal works in drama and theatre. Heathcote maintained that conventions are socially agreed constructs that people use to make meaning. They have to be used and applied in multiple contexts, that become more sophisticated over time.

It seems unlikely that Hirsch is familiar with Heathcote, he certainly does not mention her in his book, however, teachers interested in the use and developments of conventions in drama and writing might want to search her out.

Her use of framing, a theory she borrowed from Goffman, does sound very similar to Hirsch’s use of language and behaviour in different social situations.

- More on Hirsch tomorrow…

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/ed-hirsch-really-not-the-bogeyman-part-1/feed/15Why Lev Vygotsky keeps me awake at nighthttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/why-lev-vygotsky-keeps-me-awake-at-night/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/08/why-lev-vygotsky-keeps-me-awake-at-night/#commentsFri, 02 Aug 2013 14:56:31 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=884I was up late last night arguing with my arch-enemy Harry Webb aka @webofsubstance. I think it fair to say Harry and I have divergent views on education, nevertheless, we are always careful to be polite and try hard to end our disagreements on a friendly note. The topic of last night’s discussion was a sentence in Harry’s latest blog: [Ref] where he stated, “Social Constructivism is a type of discovery learning.” [Note: see below]

This is like a red rag to a bull for me, and I bit (rather too prematurely) Tweeting: “@websofsubstance sorry to be blunt, but you need to do some more reading if you think discovery learning is the same as social constructivism”. Now this wasn’t really the point of Harry’s article – which I should have read more closely before jumping to conclusions and sending a rather rude Tweet – the focus of his ardour being the dimwit educationalists who keep telling teachers they should just leave children alone to learn without guidance.

Over the course of the next five hours we argued back and forth on the meaning and use of the term Social Constructivism. Which, I’m sure, to many people must seem like a kind of madness. However, there was a serious issue at stake, one both of us were eager to resolve, me probably more than Harry.

I should explain the reason I got so upset with Harry’s assertion is because it contradicts everything I believe about education. For me, the theory of social constructivism is a heuristic for thinking about learning, its not a ideology nor is it a teaching approach. Based on the work of Lev Vygotsky [Ref], in particular his psychological model of learning called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), social constructivism is an explanation for how learning happens in the human mind, creating meaning by joining new knowledge to pre-exciting patterns in the brain. It is not a pedagogy, a teaching strategy or still less a dogma.

But this is how Harry was encountering it in his setting and why he was, in his turn, also getting very annoyed.

Despite all our differences, the one thing Harry and I share is a resentment of being told how to teach. Especially if it is by people who are telling us to do things, justified by using ideological arguments, which we know are not in the best interests of our students. This is annoying both because theories from psychology are highly contingent and because it denies us our professional judgement and expertise.

For me, a theory and an approach to teaching and learning is only as good as its utility in the classroom. I’m constantly interested in new ideas that might help me better understand the complex process of education and I strive as much as I can to become better at my job. But new ideas have to be generative and productive, increasing my knowledge and widening my repertoire of skills. I’m not interested in ideas that look to tell me how to think rigidly or look to limit my options for planning and teaching. Why I find the theory of the ZPD so convincing is that I see confirmation of it everyday, both in the classroom when I teach and in my daily life. It is a useful and coherent heuristic that helps me create new ideas and ways of thinking. And I get very upset when I think it is being used as the justification for preferring one teaching approach over another and for limiting opportunities for learning.

In my understanding of social constructivism the whole theory rests on the ZPD, therefore anything that comes from that theory – ideas about learning, teaching strategies etc – must match the terms of the ZPD. It they don’t then they are not genuinely social constructivist. In the examples Harry sites in his article (and much of what I subsequently learnt is on Wikipedia [Ref]) does not conform to this basic principle. The assumption, made by these theorists, is that social constructivism is about groups of children being left alone to make meaning. Activities are designed to give students the time and scope to discover learning outcomes and the teacher’s job is to facilitate the learning. This is not what Vygotsky advocates in his paper on the ZPD, Interaction Between Learning and Development [Ref: Ch.6 Mind & Society],

“what we call the zone of proximal development. It is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.” (p.79)

Notice please, “problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.” Vygotsky is not telling teachers to leave the kids alone. He’s explicitly saying the opposite. Vygotsky uses the term ‘mediation’ rather than facilitation to describe the role of the teacher, which is far more dynamic and interactive:

“the zone of proximal development permits us to delineate the child’s immediate future and his dynamic developmental state, allowing not only for what already has been achieved developmentally but also for what is in the course of maturing.” (p.80)

Thus, a teacher aware of the ZPD is constantly responding, adapting and adjusting her planning and teaching to the developing landscape of learning happening in her classroom. The main tool of mediation is the planning of activities, creating various opportunities for extending her student’s development within the ZPD. The teacher’s expert judgement is in the selection of activities that are challenging enough (without being too difficult), appropriate and useful to the stage in her student’s education.

Vygotsky is clearly not advocating or privileging one pedagogical approach over another. Why would he?

In conclusion, I’d like to share my very simple recipe for creating a pedagogy:

1. Take one learning theory: I like the Zone of Proximal Development (what I’ve always called social constructivism)

2. Add, three teaching approaches: Direct instruction, discovery, and inquiry (mix and use appropriately, don’t forget one or your pedagogy won’t be as good)

3. Practice, reflect and develop – the more you work on it, the better it will be.

That’s it. There is one warning, it usually takes about 10 years to make well.

As a recently qualified teacher, I first heard of the work of Howard Gardner at an INSET day in the early 1990s, his ideas were presented as the latest thinking in brain science. We were told multiple intelligences, along with a cornucopia of other discoveries, were going to revolutionise teaching and learning. Schools were to become nirvanas where each class would be transformed into an optimal learning environment; Mozart playing softly in the background, an infusion of lovely smells wafting through the air, and every activity perfectly matched to a student’s individual learning styles and intelligences.

Mostly it was nonsense. Like phrenology – dodgy theories, based on dodgy science, repackaged and sold to mugs.

At the time, we didn’t know any better. We were told these ideas were designed by brain-experts, who conducted complicated experiments (some of them involving scanners) and had hard evidence (lots of numbers and images of the brain) that proved what they were saying was true. We might think it was nonsense, but really it was the future.

So, we set to work trailing the different approaches in our classrooms. Fortunately, in the school I worked in, we had a forward thinking head who encouraged experimentation, but was no mug and was prepared to listen if we thought something wasn’t working.

After a term most of the really wacky stuff was gone. Brain gym held on for a while, as the exercises did seem to help calm down some of the more ‘hyper’ children. But I was never keen. At times music (not always Mozart) could be heard drifting through the corridors, occasionally even the smell of the odd joss stick. One thing that stayed permanently was bottled water, that genuinely seemed to help, especially on hot days and I still carry a bottle around with me wherever I go, as a consequence my brain is constantly tuned and fully hydrated.

However, Gardner was a conundrum. Unlike the other ideas, which were practical (or impractical) applications of experiments or stuff made up in California, multiple intelligences was a respected theory written by a Harvard professor. While I felt confident to say, “Brain Gym is stupid”, after being told to rub my ‘brain-buttons’, I didn’t feel qualified enough to call Howard Gardner an idiot, at least not until I’d read his book. So I ordered, “Frames of Mind”.

I don’t know if you’ve read “Frames of Mind”, its a long book, over 400 pages, and serious. I didn’t enjoy reading it and can’t say I understood everything. The truth is it wasn’t written for teachers. I know this is true because I heard Gardner speak at a conference in the mid-90s where he said (something like), “My work is in psychology, it is up to educators to explore whether it has practical applications in the classroom.” I liked him when he said that and wanted to shout out, “It doesn’t!” But I didn’t have the nerve.

Nevertheless, it would have been true, at least from my experience. After reading ‘Frames of Mind’, and exploring its implications through the work I was doing in class, I came to two conclusions, one: it was a theory that needed more evidence from the field it belonged in, cognitive psychology; two: it had little practical application in the classroom and was not a very helpful way of thinking about learning.

For me it was a lesson learned: don’t trust cognitive scientists, they’re all charlatans.

Not really. But be very cautious and test every idea you think will be useful in the classroom, with real kids. As a teacher there is really only one question that matters: “Does this help the children learn better?”

Personally I apply this principle to all the theories that come out of psychology, whether I sympathise with the psychologist’s ideology or not. As a science it is still in its infancy, there is still much that is unknown, many competing theories and different models of the mind. In biology there are still some competing theories and ideas, still new discoveries to be made, but on the whole all biologists agree on the way things work through evolution. Similarly, you won’t find geologists fighting over plate tectonics. These are mature sciences, where the major theories are agreed on, by comparison cognitive psychologists are still arguing if the world is flat or round.

This is not to say we have nothing to learn from cognitive-psychology, not at all. As a teacher I have found many ideas from the field to be helpful and generative. Rather, we should be cautious and critical, judging each idea on its merits and remembering all the time that we are the experts in the classroom.

The following are three questions I find useful to ask when judging the merits of an idea that might have a practical application:

Is it believable? This might sound like an odd question, but it can save a lot of time: I ask myself, based on my experience and thinking rationally does this idea sound genuinely believable? Brain Gym failed this test and burning joss sticks (although at least they smelt nice).

Is it practical? This is extremely important. An idea might sound rational and useful in theory, but can I make it work in the classroom? When I first heard of multiple intelligences and learning styles they sounded reasonable, even democratic which was an important principle for me, but they both failed the test of practicality when trialled in the classroom.

Does it improve what I’m doing already? All ideas need to be tested against the need to improve practice. It might sound like a very good idea to give every child in the class a written target for reading, writing and maths, but is the extra work and the time away from the children writing the targets really going to improve their learning that much or will it make things worse? This was the question we were asking ourselves in the late 90s after WALTS, WILFS and TIBS became the new orthodoxy in schools all over the country. They were almost obligatory, but did they really improve outcomes for children? We were unconvinced. Although AfL, especially oral feedback, became a major part of our practice, we resisted writing up learning objectives and constructing layered targets. For similar reasons we also rejected the Literacy Hour.

Over the years I’ve been to too many conferences where I’ve heard expressions like, “the latest research indicates… Cognitive science tells us… Scans of the brain show…blah, blah, blah” not to become a little cynical and wary of experts telling me this is the answer. I get particularly annoyed when I read fellow teachers using the same strategies in their blogs. It is the main reason I liked Daniel Willingham’s book, “Why Don’t Students Like School?” so much, because although it contained a lot of new thinking from the world of cognitive psychology, he never stepped over the line to tell me how to think or how to do my job as a teacher.

In my view, we should be very careful how we use research findings from cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychologists are a bit like those early explorers who set out to find a new route to India. Everything they discovered was new and exciting, but it didn’t mean they knew what was coming next over the horizon, let alone how the whole thing fitted together. As they sailed over the world’s oceans they had no idea how old it was or that the continents had been floating apart and crashing into each other for billions of years.

Compared to mapping the human mind, mapping the globe was a skip through the park. So let’s have a skeptical view of the work cognitive-scientists do, take what’s useful and practical, and call their ideas what they are – theories rather than evidence. They won’t mind.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/cognitive-psychology-apply-with-extreme-caution/feed/0Some further thoughts on: ‘Why Don’t Students like School?’http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/some-further-thoughts-on-why-dont-students-like-school/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/some-further-thoughts-on-why-dont-students-like-school/#commentsMon, 29 Jul 2013 12:56:26 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=868The following was compiled by Prof. Brian Edmiston as an extension of the Blog: All it is cracked up to be? Some notes on Daniel Willingham’s ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’

There’s very little in Willmingham’s book that I don’t agree with. It’s just that his view is limited and cannot conceptualise the complexity of learning and teaching. Fair’s fair, he’s a cognitive scientist so his theoretical framework is based on his understanding of the best that cognitive scientists have discovered in empirical research. As such he’s bringing the complexity of his deep knowledge to the classroom in ways that would significantly improve teaching. His premises include the following that I extend by contrasting them with some of the core assumptions I bring to my struggle to understand learning and teaching:

Some implications that I understand of a Cognitive Psychology theoretical framework applied to pedagogy

Some implications that I understand of social constructivist, sociocultural, aesthetic, and poststructural theoretical frameworks applied to pedagogy

Examples from a recent example on the theme of Pirates with YR

The fundamental unit of mind is located in the individual

The fundamental unit of mind is found in community and society (Vygotsky)

We worked as a community to think and achieve more than is possible as individuals

Children (and adults) were more often moving than being still (often as if divers and pirates) feeling (e.g. being on a sinking ship), in dialogue with others (e.g. exploring the island) considering ethical matters (e.g. should we trick the count’s brother?) all the while building a classroom culture of collaboration

Learning is the individual acquisition and processing of information for recall and application. Teaching is training.

Learning is always social first and then individual (Vygotsky). Learning is about changing learning dispositions and developing social identities as ‘learners’ in a community (Holland; Lave & Wenger)). Learning is always metaphorical since we understand that A is un/like B (Lakoff & Johnson). Teaching is mediating learning – making a difference in developing understanding.

A Polish girl had a tutor who could translate and explain what was happening and without whom the girl would often have been confused. This relationship made visible the way teachers can be supporting children. An aim was for the girl to identity as a member of the class community. The size of the pirate ship (A) was compared to the size of something they knew – the classroom (B).

A computer that processes the input-output of information is a core implicit metaphor for learning; the teacher trains people to ‘operate’ their minds

Social metaphors conceptualize classroom learning as more like learning collaboratively in an ensemble, teams, troupes, or families with a teacher taking primary (but not sole) responsibility as a leader

We both create a fictional team of divers and work almost entirely collaboratively as ourselves. Children could co-lead e.g. the boy who shared his drawing of diving equipment

Factual knowledge precedes skill; knowledge is viewed as being ‘in’ an activity (that should be as engaging as possible for the students)

Factual knowledge has to make sense to children – the more factual knowledge is actually experienced as embedded in active social situations where it is already being applied using skills that the children can participate in then the more children are supported into new factual, procedural (and conceptual) learning. Knowledge is integral to activities and not ‘in’ a task (Engestrom). Events that are ‘interesting’ to (most) students (and thus that tie in with their existing interests) are automatically engaging entry points into content.

Information about ships (e.g. looking at photos of the Golden HInd) and then diving was contextualized in an active social situation of people trying to work out what we might see on the bottom of the ocean. Particular interests of the children were identified at the beginning in active responses to the question ‘What did you like most about studying pirates?’

When teachers and students are thought of like thinking machines or computers then from a socio-cultural point of view teaching is like changing the mechanical/electronic dynamics. It’s a short step to seeing people as interchangeable and more like thinking widgets/units rather than people with whole lives.

Teachers and students are people – the quality of their shared and different relationships all affect what and how they learn (cf. Noddings)

Over the previous year(s) the children had learned how to talk and listen to one another respectfully so they were able to do that

Learning is mostly about finding ‘right’ answers – the established facts, given knowledge, and ‘the’ meaning that experts have already worked out (and that teachers believe they need to know). What Bakhtin calls ‘finalized’ understanding.

Learning is always also about raising questions – creating knowledge, especially social understanding, that is both emergent and new to the participants in how they understand and remain open to new meaning – what Bakhtin calls ‘unfinalized’ understanding

For example, what would remain from the wreck after 300 years? How could you trick someone so they wouldn’t find buried treasure?

Following the above, an ‘inquiry’ is much more of a Socratic dialogue where the teacher (or textbook) already knows the answers as intended outcomes

We learn via inquiry in the sense that people will pursue questions of interest to them and thus the complexity of a topic. An inquiry is a ‘dialogic’ (Bakhtin) exploration of a topic with others: the teacher-as-leader needs to know enough to ask ‘essential’ questions (Sizer) but does not need to know all of ‘the’ answers; teachers are learning alongside students

Two hours of YR work was an exploration of this essential inquiry question: what might we-as-divers find in the sea near the Blackbeard Hotel? Other subsidiary implicit inquiry questions included these: what might have happened on the day the ship sank? How would we dive and record what we can see?

Stories are ways of using narrative structures to transmit the complexity of information – the whole as well as the parts

Narrative is understood as a parallel to propositional knowledge as narrators/ storytellers make sense of the world (including theories about the world) from particular viewpoints that have epistemic frameworks embedded in them (Bruner)

The story of Blackbeard is a way of sharing historical, geographical, and factual information but also a way of giving a particular perspective on the pirate – as a man who wanted to scare rather than kill his victims

Being ‘critical’ is critiquing the assumptions of the narrator of whatever ‘narrative’ is being told either explicitly (in a story) or implicitly (in a any person’s interpretation of the world, including a theory); poststructural thinking critiques the power and the basis of the authority of those held up as being ‘right’ including what stories are not being told and who benefits from the narratives held up as ‘true’

How reliable are the narrators of stories e.g. Did Blackbeard’s decapitated body swim round his ship? Is this where his ship sank? With YN – should we believe and help the Duke? What might the brother say?

The teacher is primarily regarded as a provider of predetermined information presented in (ideally complex and engaging) sequences of preplanned tasks

The teacher, along with whatever ‘tools’ are available or introduced (including learning modes and the environment) is understood as opening-up/limiting students’ social ability to mediate their meaning-making (Vygotsky). The teacher is promoting an ongoing dialogue (Bakhtin) with and among students

Tools include: stories about Blackbeard; narrative about plans for the hotel; an illustration of the pirate; a drawn map of the island; a wanted poster; photos of The Golden Hind; drawings made by the children

Deep knowledge is knowledge of the parts in relation to the whole of a topic

The arts can introduce deep knowledge through the aesthetic holistic experience of core ideas/structures; the dramatic art of drama/theatre can employ strategies such as juxtapositioning to present contrasting views at the same time

The drawing of Blackbeard with his ship behind captures a holistic view of the pirate extended by the dramatized story told in context as if by Professor Taylor. With older children they could have created and presented tableaux of contrasting narratives as they advised on a display for the visitors’ centre.

Teachers create community social tasks that create ‘zones of promixal development’ for all children in which children can achieve socially beyond that they can do alone

Think of any authentic conversation (vs a lecture) between an adult and child. For example, about what might the ‘photo’ is showing is on the seabed – Brian-as-diver-colleague could ask questions, given information indirectly, press for deeper thinking etc.

Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training; children can become more intelligent through hard work

Yes, and … in the ‘mantle of the expert’ approach the ‘mantle of expertise’ is an expert (epistemic) framework for seeing ‘the whole in relation to the parts’ (not an assumption that students think about content with the complexity of real life experts) so that teacher-with-students can identify ‘gaps’ in knowledge that we-as-experts need to learn (through sustained high-quality effort) and have the authority to use in meaningful events (and thus learn in tasks that create a ZPD in terms of extending their embodied social thinking/feeling)

We-as-divers ‘see’ the wreck as a whole across time and space – what happened as the ship sank affects what we are able to ‘see’ in the present as well as how we act in response e.g. being careful. What children identify as not in our ‘photos’ can guide subsequent explorations.

The imagination is primarily valued as part of the individual’s thinking ability to create images in the mind. ‘What is’ (given knowledge) is by implication more important for young people than ‘what might be’.

Social imagination is how people can together create images of ‘what is’ as well as ‘what if …?’ or ‘what might be …?’ beyond what individuals can create. Playing with possibilities is fundamental to learning (Vygotsky)

What if … we were on the ship when it went down? What might have happened? What might be on the seabed now? Let’s imagine together in dramatic playing and in dramatic reflection as we draw and talk together.

Following from the above, drama is then more valued as functional role-play designed to transmit information

Dramatic playing, dramatic reflection, dramatic performance, and dramatic inquiry are all social learning modes in a real-and-imagined world that extend the possibilities for learning beyond what is possible when intending to learn given knowledge in the real world

Just talking with the children or only expecting them to play informally on the ship in the outdoor classroom would limit their meaning-making potential

Learning to be ‘moral’ can easily become limited to learning to understand concepts/rules/principles already worked out by others

Learning to be ethical is forming an ethical identity over time in dialogic explorations of contextualized ethical dilemmas

In dialogue children can explore core questions like these: How do we live together as a community?

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/some-further-thoughts-on-why-dont-students-like-school/feed/3All it is cracked up to be? Some notes on Daniel Willingham’s ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/all-it-is-cracked-up-to-be-some-notes-on-daniel-willinghams-why-dont-students-like-school/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/all-it-is-cracked-up-to-be-some-notes-on-daniel-willinghams-why-dont-students-like-school/#commentsFri, 26 Jul 2013 19:05:10 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=856Don’t take my word for it; Read this book. Published, April 2010.

Finally I got round to reading Daniel Willingham’s ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’ It’s been on my desk for quite a while after being recommended to me by a number of friends. It is probably the most frequently referenced book on the education blogosphere and certainly amongst the most contentious.

The following blog represents my notes and thoughts, which I started on Twitter and some people have said they found useful. I have tried as much as possible to write using Willingham’s own words. It is not an interpretation of his argument, rather an outline of the main subjects and some thoughts and opinions of my own. Most, but not all, are complementary.

My notes:

Introduction - Willingham explains the purpose of the book is to share with educators recent developments in cognitive science. The book is divided into nine chapters, each outlining a different principle “fundamental to the mind’s operation”, which he believes can be reliably applied to classroom practice.

At the centre of Willingham’s narrative is a model of the mind that describes how a person’s cognitive processes involves an interaction between the environment and their Working Memory (WM), in tandem, with their Long-Term Memory (LTM).

“Successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in the LTM, procedures in LTM, and the amount of space in the WM.” [p.18]

My thoughts:

I’m not a cognitive scientist and I’m not an expert in all the most recent research in the field, however, I’m quite capable of recognising a theory when I see one and am always sceptical when I’m being asked to accept one on trust. Willingham spends very little time explaining how his model works (especially these mysterious ‘procedures’) or how scientists know the theory is robust; He basically asks us to take his word for it, however other theories are available [Ref].

Based on how little scientists actually know about how the human mind works, my view is all theories in cognitive science are extremely tenuous, and as a consequence should be considered with maximum scepticism and constantly tested by experiences in the real world: Especially those that reduce all the subtle complexity of human learning and understanding to three boxes with arrows pointing at them.

However, that is not to say Willingham’s book is without merit. In fact much of it is very useful. For example, I’m interested when Willingham tells me stories are an effective and engaging medium for helping children make new meaning and remember new information. But, I’m less interested when he tells me (according to his cognitive theory) this is because children’s working memory gets overloaded.

The strength of this book is that it contains good educational advice (mostly); its weakness is its constant reference to a theory in science that I find fundamentally unconvincing.

My Notes:

Principle 1:People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.

Willingham offers a list of seven things teachers can do to ensure their student’s enjoy school:

Be sure that there are problems to be solved – “I mean cognitive work that poses moderate challenge… without some attention a lesson plan can become a long string of teacher explanations, with little opportunity for students to solve problems. So scan each lesson plan with an eye toward the cognitive work that students will be doing. How often does such work occur? Is it intermixed with cognitive breaks?”

Respect students’ cognitive limits – Background knowledge and cognitive skills; “overloads of WM are caused by such things as multi-step instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and the application of a just-learned concept to new material.”

Clarifying the problem to be solved – “Sometimes we are so eager to get to the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question… it is the question that piques people’s interest. Being told an answer doesn’t do anything for you.”

Reconsider when to puzzle students – the “goal is make them curious.”

Accept and act on variation in student preparation – “it is self-defeating to give all your students the same work.”

Change the pace – to grab the students’ attention.

Keep a diary – for honest reflection.

My thoughts:

This is an extremely sensible list acknowledging the importance of working from where the students are while striving to plan and teach activities that challenge their cognitive limits and keep them engaged. I particularly noted the importance Willingham gives to questioning and creating opportunities for students to puzzle things out for themselves, not rushing to explain or give the answer. Throughout the book he is careful to give the central roles to both knowledge acquisition and skills development [procedural knowledge].

My notes:

Principle 2:Factual knowledge must precede skill.

Although this is the ‘principle’ of this chapter is appears as a line in a paragraph. Here is the paragraph in full:

“The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: Factual knowledge must precede skill. The implication is that facts must be taught, ideally in the context of skills, and ideally beginning in preschool and even before.” [p.26]

Note Willingham is careful to include the rider, “in the context of skills”. This is a strategy he uses throughout the book, making a bold claim and then immediately qualifying his assertion, allowing him to appeal to teachers across the pedagogical spectrum.

Be sure that the knowledge base is mostly in place when you require critical thinking

Shallow knowledge is better than no knowledge

Do what you can to get kids to read

Knowledge acquisition can be incidental

Start early

Knowledge must be meaningful – “Teachers should not take the importance of knowledge to mean that they should create lists of facts for students to learn… knowledge pays off when it is conceptual and when the facts are related to one another and that is not true of list learning. Also, as any teacher knows, such drilling would do far more harm by making students miserable and by encouraging the belief that school is a place of boredom and drudgery, not excitement and discovery.” (p.51)

My thoughts:

I approached this chapter in some trepidation, the principle: Factual knowledge must precede skill sounded particularly ominous. Summoning up images of Victorian classrooms and drilling facts. However, I needn’t have worried. In fact Willingham is careful to warn teachers this is not his intention, making it clear that although factual knowledge is the bedrock of learning, it is important that new knowledge is quickly used and applied in meaningful activities. Involving tasks that challenge students’ cognitive skills, engage them in exciting environments for learning and helping them make meaning.

My Notes:

Principle 3:Memory is the residue of thought.

The central idea behind this principle is that teachers “must pay careful attention to what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.” (p.54)

Therefore:

“a teacher’s goal should almost always be to get students to think about meaning”

working on the meaning is important (interpretation) “there can be different aspects of meaning for the same material

“a student must pay attention to it [the material being learned]. Further, how the student thinks of the experience completely determines what will end up in the LTM.

Therefore, “ensure that students are thinking about the meaning of the material”

Willingham argues (convincingly) that trying to make the material relevant to students’ own interests doesn’t work and we should concentrate rather on making the material meaningful and engaging. “Effective teachers… are able to connect personally with students, and they organise the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.” (p.65)

He then discusses one of the most interesting (for me) themes of the book, “The Power of Stories”.

A story, he explains, is structured around four principles, often summarised as the four Cs:

Causality

Conflict

Complications

Characters

“A good story is built around strong, interesting characters, and the key to those qualities is action. A skilful storyteller shows rather than tells the audience what a character is like.” (p.67)

Stories bring three important advantages to teaching:

They are easy to comprehend

They are interesting

They are easy to remember

“Structure your lessons the way stories are structured using the four Cs… This doesn’t mean you must do most of the talking. Small group work or projects or any other method may be used. The story structure applies to the way you organise the material that you encourage your students to think about, not the methods you use to teach the material.” (p.70)

At this point he again mentions the importance of questioning, “The material I want the students to learn is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting. That’s why making the question clear is so important. (p.75)

Willingham’s end by making clear his position on pedagogy: “Let me close this section by emphasising again that there are many ways in which one can be a good teacher… I’m stating that every teacher should get his or her students to think about the meaning of the material.” (p.75)

Further “Use discovery learning with care… [although] discovery learning has much to recommend it… what students will think about is less predictable… they may well explore mental paths that are not profitable… this doesn’t mean that discovery learning should never be used… it is probably most useful when the environment gives prompt feedback.” (p.82)

I’ve quoted as much as I can from this paragraph, trying to be fair to the meaning, without copying out the whole thing. You can see once again how Willingham makes a statement “Use discovery learning with care” and then immediately qualifies it, “discovery learning has much to recommend it”. What does he mean? You can see how different people have used his words to support opposing arguments: To my mind Willingham is being very sensible, putting the emphasis on learning, rather than pedagogy. I don’t see any evidence, at any point in the book, that he is promoting one teaching approach over another.

My favourite piece of advice at the end of this chapter is, “Try organising a lesson plan around the conflict… we want students to know the answer to a question – and the question is the conflict.” This suggests teachers think about the where the ‘tension’ lies in any lesson (‘inquiry’?). “Structuring a lesson plan around conflict can be a real aid to student learning… you are engaging students with the actual substance of the discipline… what I’m suggesting is that student’s interests should not be the main driving force of lesson planning. Rather they might be used as initial points of contact that help students understand the main ideas you want them to consider, rather than as the reason or motivation for them to consider these ideas.” (p.85)

My thoughts:

There is much I like in this chapter, particularly Willingham’s advocacy of using stories to engage students and make the curriculum meaningful. I didn’t expect to see tension (conflict) and inquiry (questioning and problem-solving) given such prominence, especially within narrative structures. Great stuff. Willingham is clearly not someone who thinks education is about ‘entertaining’ (distracting) children, which is quite right. But neither is he someone who ignores the importance of engaging them and making learning meaningful and exciting.

My Notes:

Principle 4:We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.

Analogies help us understand something new by relating it to something we already know about

A consequence of dependence on prior knowledge is our need for concrete and familiar examples

Understanding is remembering in disguise. “No one can pour new ideas into a student’s head directly. Every new idea must build on ideas that the student already knows.” (p.92)

Willingham makes clear the contrast between:

Shallow Knowledge: Students have some understanding of the material but their understanding is limited – they can understand the concept only in the context

Deep Knowledge: Students know more about the subject and the pieces are more richly connected – “they are not just parts but also the whole.”

This makes knowledge transfer not impossible, but very difficult in most circumstances.

He suggests:

To help student comprehension, provide examples and ask students to compare them – provide lots of experiences, via lots of examples. Help students to think about deep structures.

Make deep knowledge the spoken and unspoken emphasis – “What kinds of questions do you pose in the class?”

Make your expectations for deep knowledge realistic – deep knowledge is hard-won and is the product of much practice.

My thoughts:

This chapter made me wonder how much of the new curriculum could be characterised as developing Deep Knowledge; making ‘rich connections’ and helping students see not just the “parts, but the whole’?

My notes:

Principle 5:It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice

There are two reasons for continued practice:

To gain competence

To improve

With three benefits:

It reinforces the basic skills

Protects against forgetting

It improves transfer

Over time, with practice, mental processes can become automatised, requiring little or no WM capacity.

Practice the processes that need to become automatic – probably the building blocks of skills that will provide the most benefit if they are automatised.

Practice works better if it’s spaced out.

Fold practice into more advanced skills.

My thoughts:

Some learning is a chore, accept it, put in the hours, but don’t over do it. Explain to the students why: ‘Not everything worth learning is fun to learn, I promise I won’t ever waste your time.’

My Notes:

Principle 6:Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training.

This sentence sums up Willingham’s argument in this chapter in a nutshell, “In truth, no one thinks like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. This conclusion doesn’t mean that students should never try to write a poem or conduct a scientific experiment; but teachers should have a clear idea of what such assignments will do for students.” (p.128)

My Notes:

Principle 7:Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn

This chapter demolishes learning styles and multiple intelligences. Since I don’t care for either, and never did, I’m not going to summarise Willingham’s argument, other than to say he thinks they are both wrong and teachers should use their professional judgement to differentiate and ‘scaffold’ (my word) their lessons appropriately.

My Notes:

Principle 8:Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work

This chapter contains some useful advice for helping your students to think of intelligence as something they can improve through hard work and reflection.

“How can we improve intelligence?

Convince our students that intelligence can be improved

Genuinely ‘praise’ effort not ability (avoid insincere praise)

Treat failure as a natural part of learning (model this by highlighting your own mistakes)

Don’t take study skills for granted – “All students must learn new [study skills] like self-discipline, time management and resourcefulness (knowing what to do when they are stumped)” (p.185)

My Notes:

Principle 9:Teaching like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved

Basically:

Apply the same principles to yourself as you do to the student’s you teach

It takes ten years to become an expert teacher

However, experience is not the same as deliberate practice

So, practice and reflect on your own work, get useful feedback

And practice more

My thoughts:

After reading this chapter I thought teachers who stop practicing are not worthy of the name and need to stop telling others how to do it.

In conclusion:

As I said at the very beginning, don’t take my word for it, go and buy the book. It is a good primer for some of the fundamental elements of good teaching and learning. However, it is an incomplete picture and a bit more honesty about the status of the science would have been welcome.

The following is a list of some of the other ‘fundamental’ elements, which are either entirely missing or given little prominence in Willingham’s narrative:

The role of imagination is completely ignored, except from the Einstein quote. Willingham doesn’t argue against imagination having a role in learning, he simply disregards it. It is tempting to say this is because cognitive scientists don’t currently understand the role played by imagination in learning, this is certainly the view of Kieran Egan [Ref], and it is undoubtedly a complex subject, however educators, authors and artists are well aware of its utility and don’t need to understand how it works in the human mind, to know it does.

There is very little discussion about the role of community. The teaching and learning process described in the book is fundamentally a private affair between the student and their mind, influenced by the teacher. Community is always there, lurking in the shadows, but it never brought out and given a place of importance. It would be easy to read, “Why don’t students…” and not think that human relationships, communities of learning or classroom environments had anything much to do with the process. Lave & Wenger, Situated Learning [Ref].

Similarly emotions – beyond simple pleasure and engagement – are generally ignored. The question of influence and power relationships in the classroom are completely absent. Although there is a welcome acknowledgement of the use of ‘praise’ for effort over ability, this is not expanded to include analyse of intrinsic motivation and agency. For more on this subject you might want to read Alfie Kohn, ‘Punished by Rewards’ [Ref] and Devine, Children, Power and Schooling [Ref].

He also doesn’t mention ‘active’ or ‘enactive’ learning of any kind. Students are static throughout his book, apart from sports, and the learning model is entirely centred on the mind. This is not unexpected, but still an oversight. Dorothy Heathcote [Ref.], an academic who taught in classrooms until the year she died at 86, would have had a thing or two to say about a learning theory that didn’t involve meaning making through action.

I love Venn diagrams, here is an approximation of what I’m trying to say:

References:

Prof. Daniel T Willingham is a psychologist at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the application of findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K-12 education.” [Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_T._Willingham]

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/all-it-is-cracked-up-to-be-some-notes-on-daniel-willinghams-why-dont-students-like-school/feed/7The road less travelledhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/the-road-less-travelled/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/the-road-less-travelled/#commentsMon, 22 Jul 2013 12:09:37 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=846This article first appeared in Teach Primary and is re-printed here with their kind permission.

I like to imagine the curriculum as a map of a country only partly explored. There are aspects – the coastline, a mountain range, some major rivers – that are well known to previous explorers, but there are others, too – the dark interior – that represent an unknown land waiting to be discovered. Of course, some parts of the new world we are told we have to visit, these are the mandatory places every traveller goes to, but there are others only we will find; places for us to explore and put on the map.

This is a rather fanciful way of saying I see the curriculum as something I build in collaboration with a class over the year. Some parts are the prescribed objectives of skills, knowledge and understanding laid down by the National Curriculum. Others though emerge from the work we do as a learning community together in the classroom. For this reason I plan for ambiguity, for openness and for opportunities for the children to contribute their ideas. The activities, questions, and challenges I plan for in advance are like the routes we take as we explore, but much of what we will find I deliberately leave undecided.

Of course there is a danger in this approach that we will wonder off on a side path and get lost or forget to travel to those places on the map we are obliged to visit. This happened to a friend of mine who, when teaching Nelson with a year 1 class, found she had spent three weeks studying sharks. For this reason I find the first steps into a new learning context are the most important. It is essential to establish clearly from the beginning what it is we are exploring, for what purpose, and where we hope to end up. Many explorers have lost their way due to bad planning and preparation.

Parklife

I’ll give you an example from a unit of work I’ve done many times with infants: reception, year 1 and year 2. The topic is animals; the mandatory curriculum centres on Key Stage 1 science, but the cross-curricular opportunities include reading, writing, speaking/listening, maths, geography, art and ICT.

In the imaginary context I plan, the children will work as a team of rangers running an animal park. The park is an ethical business; open to visitors, but with the welfare of the animals as its main priority. There is a wide range of animals at the park – many of them will have been saved from poachers, rescued from badly run zoos or treated for injuries. The purpose of the park is to educate people about the animals, to treat them humanely and ultimately, if possible, to return them to the wild.

These are what might be called the ‘givens’, those features on the map already explored (and which we will definitely visit), and some of the main routes and paths we will be taking along the way. When I plan, my purpose is only to decide in advance as much as I have to and to leave as many opportunities as I can for the children to ask questions and contribute ideas. As a principle, I think a child’s idea is always much better than my own, as long as we end up exploring the same curriculum.

So then, in the first steps into the animal park context I ask the children what kind of animal they would like to look after, if they were people looking after animals in a park. This is an easy question for a class of young children. There usually follows a short conversation, something like:

“A rabbit.”

“Oh, do you have several rabbits you look after or just one?”

“Lots.”

“Um, are people who visit the park allowed to pet them?”

“Yes, as long as they are careful.”

“Of course. Does anyone look after a dangerous animal?”

Several hands go up.

“I look after the lions.”

“Ok, are they together or kept apart? I know sometimes lions can fight.”

And so on. My questions are designed to steer the children’s thinking into the context. To help them understand what it is we are trying to develop together not ‘telling’ them: “Today we are going to build an animal park.” Generally teachers spend too much time telling kids what to do and not enough time listening to them. When I’m asking these questions I’m not looking for the right answers, I’m aiming to use them within the context we are building and trying to help extend their thinking.

The priorities at this stage are to firmly establish what the context involves and to engage the children’s interests so they feel they have a contribution to make. As the context develops then the children can start making more of the decisions and contributing more of the ideas, which I can then use as the basis for further classroom activities. In this way the curriculum might be said to ‘emerge’ from the work, much like (to continue my metaphor) a new landscape might be said to emerge before a team of explorers.

The key thing here is to work (as much as the requirements of the mandatory curriculum allow) collaboratively with the children and, in this way, to develop and extend their knowledge, skills and understanding. This approach is called imaginative-inquiry, and it involves using a combination of different teaching strategies – inquiry, drama for learning and mantle of the expert – to create imaginary worlds for children to explore. These environments, like the animal park context, can work as a sort of evolving storyline, providing setting, narrative and tension to the children’s studies and making the curriculum more purposeful, relevant and exciting.

Imaginative-inquiry is not a new idea, although it has a new name – in fact, it’s a well-researched pedagogy with a long history of practical application in the classroom. Teachers use it in many different ways, some as a single lesson (perhaps at the end of the week), others as a year-long project incorporating large amounts of the curriculum. It is a flexible approach and has the advantage of drawing on the children’s imagination and energy. Often there is a great deal of detailed planning that has to be done in the beginning to make sure the context will do the job of teaching the curriculum, but once it is established most teachers find the process becomes much easier as ideas emerge from the work. To help with the initial stages a group of colleagues and I have built a subscription website (imaginative-inquiry.co.uk) with a developing range of imaginary contexts, written by teachers, each one with a step-by-step sequence that you can use to get started.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/the-road-less-travelled/feed/0Curriculum 2014 – Programmes of Studyhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/curriculum-2014-programmes-of-study/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/curriculum-2014-programmes-of-study/#commentsMon, 22 Jul 2013 11:44:58 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=826Teacher Alex Crump – @alfiecrump – from Shellingford Primary has compiled the complete programmes of study for the new Primary Curriculum, due to become law for non-academy primary school in September, 2014:

The art and design programmes of study have been noticeably reduced in the new curriculum. However, the aims and purposes remain very much the same.

Note: Unlike other subjects in the new curriculum, the aims of A&D are not made explicit at KS1 (this may change with the final document) and so I’ve included the purposes and aims for the whole subject (Ks1,2&3) in both the tables below.

KS.1 Programmes of Study

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Changes

AimsDuring key stage 1 pupils develop:

their creativity and imagination by exploring the visual, tactile and sensory qualities of materials and processes.

They learn about the role of art, craft and design in their environment.

They begin to understand colour, shape and space and pattern and texture and use them to represent their ideas and feelings.

Purpose of study

should engage, inspire and challenge pupils, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art, craft and design.

As pupils progress, they should be able to think critically and develop a more rigorous understanding of art and design.

They should also know how art and design both reflect and shape our history, and contribute to the culture, creativity and wealth of our nation.

Aims

ensure that all pupils:

produce creative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences

become proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques

evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art, craft and design

know about great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the

historical and cultural development of their art forms.

No change

Exploring and developing ideasPupils should be taught to:

record from first-hand observation, experience and imagination, and explore ideas

ask and answer questions about the starting points for their work, and develop their ideas.

Pupils should be taught:

to use drawing, painting and sculpture to develop and share their ideas,

Investigating and making art, craft and designPupils should be taught to:

investigate the possibilities of a range of materials and processes

try out tools and techniques and apply these to materials and processes, including drawing

represent observations, ideas and feelings, and design and make images and artefacts.

to use a range of materials creatively to design and make products, experiences and imagination

No Change

Evaluating and developing workPupils should be taught to:

review what they and others have done and say what they think and feel about it

identify what they might change in their current work or develop in their future work.

to develop a wide range of art and design techniques in using colour, pattern, texture, line, shape, form and space

No change

Knowledge and understandingPupils should be taught about:

visual and tactile elements, including colour, pattern and texture, line and tone, shape, form and space

materials and processes used in making art, craft and design

differences and similarities in the work of artists, craftspeople and designers in different times and cultures

about the work of a range of artists, craft makers and designers, describing the differences and similarities between different practices and disciplines, and making links to their own work.

No change

Breadth of studyDuring the key stage, pupils should be taught the Knowledge, skills and understanding through:

exploring a range of starting points for practical work

working on their own, and collaborating with others, on projects in two and three dimensions and on different scales

using a range of materials and processes

investigating different kinds of art, craft and design

KS.2 Programmes of Study

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Changes

AimsDuring key stage 2 pupils:

develop their creativity and imagination through more complex activities.

These help to build on their skills and improve their control of materials, tools and techniques.

They increase their critical awareness of the roles and purposes of art, craft and design in different times and cultures.

They become more confident in using visual and tactile elements and materials and processes to communicate what they see, feel and think.

Purpose of study

should engage, inspire and challenge pupils, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art, craft and design.

As pupils progress, they should be able to think critically and develop a more rigorous understanding of art and design.

They should also know how art and design both reflect and shape our history, and contribute to the culture, creativity and wealth of our nation.

Aims

ensure that all pupils:

produce creative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences

become proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques

evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art, craft and design

know about great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the

historical and cultural development of their art forms.

No change

Exploring and developing ideasPupils should be taught to:

record from experience and imagination, to select and record from first-hand observation and to explore ideas for different purposes

question and make thoughtful observations about starting points and select ideas to use in their work

collect visual and other information to help them develop their ideas, including using a sketchbook.

Pupils should be taught to:

develop their techniques, including their control and their use of materials, with creativity, experimentation

and an increasing awareness of different kinds of art, craft and design.

Pupils should be taught:

to create sketch books to record their observations and use them to review and revisit ideas

Investigating and making art, craft and designPupils should be taught to:

investigate the possibilities of a range of materials and processes

try out tools and techniques and apply these to materials and processes, including drawing

represent observations, ideas and feelings, and design and make images and artefacts.

to improve their mastery of art and design techniques, including drawing, painting and sculpture with a range of materials

No Change

Evaluating and developing workPupils should be taught to:

compare ideas, methods and approaches in their own and others’ work and say what they think and feel about them

adapt their work according to their views and describe how they might

These elements are not expressed explicitly in the new curriculum

Knowledge and understandingPupils should be taught about:

visual and tactile elements, including colour, pattern and texture, line and tone, shape, form and space, and how these elements can be combined and organised for different purposes

materials and processes used in art, craft and design and how these can be matched to ideas and intentions

the roles and purposes of artists, craftspeople and designers working in different times and cultures

about great artists, architects and designers in history.

The guidance and requirements in this section have been much reduced.

Breadth of studyDuring the key stage, pupils should be taught the Knowledge, skills and understanding through:

exploring a range of starting points for practical work

working on their own, and collaborating with others, on projects in two and three dimensions and on different scales

using a range of materials and processes, including ICT

investigating art, craft and design in the locality and in a variety of genres, styles and traditions

At primary level, both KS1 and KS2 the design and technology curriculum has hardly changed in any meaningful way. There is a small change at KS2 where students are now required to communicate using a specific list of methods, see below.

KS.1 Programmes of Study

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Changes

Aims

During key stage 1 pupils learn:

how to think imaginatively

and talk about what they like and dislike when designing
and making.

They build on their early childhood experiences of investigating objects around them.

They explore how familiar things work

and talk about, draw and model their ideas.

to design and make safely and could start to use ICT as part of their designing
and making.

Aims

Through a variety of creative and practical activities, pupils should be taught:

the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to engage in an iterative process of designing and making.

They should work in a range of relevant contexts, [such as the home and school, gardens and playgrounds, the local community, industry and the wider environment.]

No change

Developing, planning and communicating ideas

1. Pupils should be taught to:

generate ideas by drawing on their own and other people’s experiences

develop ideas by shaping materials and putting together components

talk about their ideas

plan by suggesting what to do next as their ideas develop

communicate their ideas using a variety of methods, including drawing and making models

Design

design purposeful, functional, appealing products for themselves and other users based on design criteria

Working with tools, equipment, materials and components to make quality products

Pupils should be taught to:

select appropriate tools and techniques for making their product

suggest alternative ways of making their product, if first attempts fail

explore the sensory qualities of materials and how to use materials and processes

measure, mark out, cut and shape a range of materials, and assemble, join and combine components and materials accurately

use finishing techniques to strengthen and improve the appearance of their product, using a range of equipment including ICT

follow safe procedures for food safety and hygiene.

Make

select from and use a wider range of tools and equipment to perform practical tasks, such as cutting, shaping, joining and finishing, accurately

select from and use a wider range of materials and components, including construction materials, textiles and ingredients, according to their functional properties and aesthetic qualities

No Change

Evaluating processes and products

Pupils should be taught to:

reflect on the progress of their work as they design and make, identifying ways they could improve their products

carry out appropriate tests before making any improvements

recognise that the quality of a product depends on how well it is made and how well it meets its intended purpose

Evaluate

investigate and analyse a range of existing products

evaluate their ideas and products against their own design criteria and consider

the views of others to improve their work

understand how key events and individuals in design and technology have helped shape the world

No change

Knowledge and understanding of materials and components

Pupils should be taught to:

how the working characteristics of materials affect the ways they are used

how materials can be combined and mixed to create more useful properties

how mechanisms can be used to make things move in different ways, using a range of equipment including an ICT control program

how electrical circuits, including those with simple switches, can be used to achieve results that work.

Technical knowledge

apply their understanding of how to strengthen, stiffen and reinforce more complex structures

understand and use mechanical systems in their products, such as gears, pulleys, cams, levers and linkages

understand and use electrical systems in their products, such as series circuits incorporating switches, bulbs, buzzers and motors

apply their understanding of computing to programme, monitor and control their products.

No change

Breadth of study

investigating and evaluating a range of familiar products, thinking about how they work, how they are used and the views of the people who use them

focused practical tasks that develop a range of techniques, skills, processes and knowledge

design and make assignments using a range of materials, including electrical and mechanical components, food, mouldable materials, stiff and flexible sheet materials, and textiles.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/design-technology-as-you-were/feed/0Who would have believed the new primary history curriculum would have turned out so well?http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/who-would-have-believed-the-new-primary-history-curriculum-would-have-turned-out-so-well/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/who-would-have-believed-the-new-primary-history-curriculum-would-have-turned-out-so-well/#commentsSat, 13 Jul 2013 16:04:45 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=810On Monday the DfE published the latest draft of the new National Curriculum and many working in the primary sector greeted it with a massive sigh of relief. Most of the grand excesses of the February draft had either been softened or gone altogether and nowhere were these revisions more welcome than in the History curriculum.

The wave of consternation and criticism that crashed into Michael Gove following the February draft threatened to sweep away the whole new curriculum project and it seems he listened or was forced to concede, depending on your point of view.

So, where are we now, now the dust has settled? Certainly, as far as Key Stage 1 is concerned, not very far from where we started. With a few minor changes teachers in year 1 and 2 can carry on after September 2104 as if nothing much has happened. There are some small alterations, some new names on the lists of suggested famous people, perhaps a tiny amount more emphasis on vocabulary, but essentially the aims and content of the new KS1 curriculum are very much like the old.

The more noticeable changes are in Key Stage 2.

One clear result of the review has been the return of historical enquiry skills. The new programmes of study require schools to, “ensure all pupils understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.” This is very welcome and ends the idea that the study of history in primary schools should constitute nothing more than the rote learning of people, dates and events. In fact, the requirements of the new curriculum go further than the old, proposing that history should be both interesting and open to critical interpretation, “A high-quality history education… should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.” This is no curriculum for Gradgrind education, but a challenge to make the study of history stimulating, exciting and intellectually demanding.

Another aim of the new curriculum is to ensure students develop an historical perspective, placing their growing knowledge into different contexts and understanding connections. Stories play an important role and there is an emphasis on teaching skills and knowledge within coherent and meaningful narratives. The new curriculum is not organised as a chronological route march through two thousand years of English history, but as a range of units (many of which will look familiar) incorporating six British history studies, one early civilization study, one study of ancient Greece and one non-European study.

This might seem to mean an increase from six to nine units; however, when considering the extra workload there are two things to bear in mind. The first is that while this change clearly represents extra content, the new curriculum now allows schools to make a distinction between what it calls ‘overview’ studies and ‘depth’ studies, implying that some units can be taught quickly, perhaps in a few lessons, while other units need to be taught in much greater detail. This distinction was not made in the old curriculum and it is likely schools will want some clarification over the next year on what these changes represent. The second thing to bear in mind is that the local history study in the new curriculum can be taught either as a separate unit (allowing schools to teach a second British history study beyond 1066) or as combined unit with one of the other areas, for example, “The Roman Empire and its impact on Britain”. This means that schools can reduce the total number of units from nine to eight by combining two units together.

This increased flexibility is a feature of the new curriculum and is further illustrated by the unit, “A study of an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupil’s chronological knowledge beyond 1066.” One of the major complaints from primary schools about the February draft was that it denied them the chance to teach some of the more popular units from Curriculum 2000, in particular the Victorians and World War 2. These complaints have been heard and it is now possible for schools to continue teaching these topics through the ‘Local history study’ and the ‘Beyond 1066 study’.

Many primary school teachers will also welcome the resurrection (sorry) of the Ancient Egypt unit of study, which was squeezed out of the February draft. Although, it is important to note, Ancient Egypt is only one of list including, Ancient Sumer; The Indus Valley; and The Shang Dynasty of Ancient China.

Another change is the division of the ‘Invaders and Settlers unit’ from one study to three. In Curriculum 2000 it was only compulsory for schools to teach one of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons or Vikings at Key Stage 2 (although many primary schools chose to teach all three). In the new curriculum it is now compulsory for students to study all three. This is going to represent a significant shift in the teaching of Anglo-Saxons, where the emphasis in the new curriculum is on a much more detailed teaching than was required in Curriculum 2000.

Overall, it seems likely most primary schools will welcome the new programmes of study for History. It has a balance between developing enquiry skills and acquiring important historical knowledge, and an emphasis on understanding and developing critical analysis. It also corrects the mistake of the old curriculum by making it now compulsory for children to study the entire history of pre-1066 Britain.

While the new curriculum makes new demands on key stage 2 teachers, in particular the non-European society unit and the extra work on the Anglo-Saxons, it also offers new opportunities and challenges. There is a clear emphasis on the importance of narrative to the study of history, “know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative” and to making links and developing historical study skills in context. It is admirable that the new framework pulls of the trick of being both flexible and clear in its aims and constructive and coherent in its frame of reference.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/who-would-have-believed-the-new-primary-history-curriculum-would-have-turned-out-so-well/feed/2Geography: Comparing the old and new KS.2http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/geography-comparing-the-old-and-new-ks-2/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/geography-comparing-the-old-and-new-ks-2/#commentsSat, 13 Jul 2013 10:51:39 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=803Click here to read this blog as a Word Document

On analysis it is clear the emphasis in the primary Geography curriculum has shifted noticeably from developing enquiry skills to acquiring geographical knowledge. Although students are still required to develop practical skills in fieldwork, compass reading and map reading, they are no longer explicitly required to ask geographical questions, analyse evidence or draw conclusions.

However, in the subject’s ‘Purpose of Study’ it is stated a high-quality geographical education should, “inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination… together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes”. It does not require or suggest any specific pedagogy, leaving teaching and learning approaches for schools to decide.

Changes at KS.2:

Geographical enquiry skills now termed as Geographical skills and fieldwork

No longer requirement for students to ask geographical questions or express their own views, analyse evidence & draw conclusions

Introduction of developing compass skills and map reading skills – use the eight points of a compass, four and six-figure grid references, symbols and key

New requirements:

locate the world’s countries, using maps to focus on Europe and North and South America, concentrating on their environmental regions, key physical and human characteristics, countries, and major cities

name and locate counties and cities of the UK, geographical regions and their identifying human and physical characteristics, key topographical features & land-use patterns; & understand how some of these aspects have changed over time

identify the position and significance of latitude, longitude, Equator, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Arctic and Antarctic Circle, the Prime/Greenwich Meridian and time zones (including day and night)

Note: C2000 provided a list of examples of significant places & the environment to be learnt in KS2 which closely resembles the required list in the new curriculum.

The section in the old curriculum on Environmental change and sustainable development has been dropped

identify and explain different views that people, including themselves, hold about topical geographical issues

communicate in ways appropriate to the task and audience

In developing geographical skills, pupils should be taught:

to use appropriate geographical vocabulary

to use appropriate fieldwork techniques

to use atlases and globes, and maps and plans at a range of scales

to use secondary sources of information, including aerial photographs

to draw plans and maps at a range of scales

to use ICT to help in geographical investigations decision-making skills

Geographical skills and fieldwork

use maps, atlases, globes and digital/computer mapping to locate countries and describe features studied

use the eight points of a compass, four and six-figure grid references, symbols and key (including the use of Ordnance Survey maps) to build their knowledge of the United Kingdom and the wider world

use fieldwork to observe, measure and record the human and physical features in the local area using a range of methods, including sketch maps, plans and graphs, and digital technologies.

Geographical enquiry skills now termed as Geographical skills and fieldwork

No longer requirement for students to ask geographical questions or express their own views, analyse evidence & draw conclusions

Geographical enquiry skills now termed as Geographical skills and fieldwork

No longer requirement for students to ask geographical questions or express their own views, analyse evidence & draw conclusions

New curriculum requires:

Developing compass skills and map reading skills – use the eight points of a compass, four and six-figure grid references, symbols and key

PlacesPupils should be taught to:

to identify and describe what places are like

the location of places and environments they study and other significant places and environments

to describe where places are

to explain why places are like they are

to identify how and why places change and how they may change in the future

to describe and explain how and why places are similar to and different from other places in the same country and elsewhere in the world

how places fit within a wider geographical context and are interdependent

Location knowledge

locate the world’s countries, using maps to focus on Europe and North and South America, concentrating on their environmental regions, key physical and human characteristics, countries, and major cities

name and locate counties and cities of the UK, geographical regions and their identifying human and physical characteristics, key topographical features & land-use patterns; & understand how some of these aspects have changed over time

identify the position and significance of latitude, longitude, Equator, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Arctic and Antarctic Circle, the Prime/Greenwich Meridian and time zones (including day and night)

Place knowledge

understand geographical similarities and differences through the study of human and physical geography of a region of the United Kingdom, a region in a European country, and a region within North or South America

New requirements:

locate the world’s countries, using maps

name and locate counties and cities

identify the position and significance of latitude

Patterns and processesPupils should be taught to:

recognise and explain patterns made by individual physical and human features in the environment

recognise some physical and human processes and explain how these can cause changes in places and environments.

Although this unit has been dropped from the new curriculum as an explicit study, patterns & processes do appear in the other units in the new curriculum.

Environmental change and sustainable developmentPupils should be taught to:

recognise how people can improve the environment or damage it and how decisions about places and environments affect the future quality of people’s lives

recognise how and why people may seek to manage environments sustainably, and to identify opportunities for their own involvement

The section in the old curriculum on Environmental change and sustainable development has been dropped

human geography, including: types of settlement and land use, economic activity including trade links, and the distribution of natural resources including energy, food, minerals and water

This is a new unit, however, much of the content in this unit appeared in different places in the old curriculum.

Breadth of studythe study of two localities:

Localities

a locality in the United Kingdom

a locality in a country that is less economically developed

Themes

water and its effects on landscapes and people, including the physical features of rivers or coasts and the processes of erosion and deposition that affect them

how settlements differ and change, including why they differ in size and character and an issue arising from changes in land use

an environmental issue, caused by change in an environment and attempts to manage the environment sustainably

In their study of localities and themes, pupils should:

study at a range of scales – local, regional and national

study a range of places and environments in different parts of the world, including the United Kingdom and the European Union

carry out fieldwork investigations outside the classroom.

The new curriculum does not contain guidance on breadth of study.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/geography-comparing-the-old-and-new-ks-2/feed/2Geography: Comparing the old and new KS.1http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/geography-comparing-the-old-and-new-ks-1/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/geography-comparing-the-old-and-new-ks-1/#commentsFri, 12 Jul 2013 16:08:58 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=796Click here to read this blog as a Word Document

Geographical enquiry skills now termed as Geographical skills and fieldwork

No longer requirement for students to ask geographical questions or express their own views

Introduction of simple compass skills (directions etc)

New requirements:

Location knowledge: name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans and to name, locate and identify characteristics of the four countries and capital cities of UK and its surrounding seas

Identify seasonal and daily weather patterns in the UK and the location of hot and cold areas of the world in relation to the Equator and the North and South Poles

A list of basic geographical vocabulary

The section in the old curriculum on Environmental change and sustainable development has been dropped

use simple compass directions to describe the location of features and routes on a map

use aerial photographs and plan perspectives to recognise landmarks and basic human and physical features;

devise a simple map; and use and construct basic symbols in a key

use simple fieldwork and observational skills to study the geography of their school and its grounds and the key human and physical features of its surrounding environment.

Geographical enquiry skills now termed as Geographical skills and fieldwork

No longer requirement for students to ask geographical questions or express their own views

Introduction of simple compass skills (directions etc)

PlacesPupils should be taught to:

identify and describe what places are like

identify and describe where places are

recognise how places have become the way they are and how they are changing

d. recognise how places compare with other places recognise how places are linked to other places in the

Location knowledge

name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans

name, locate and identify characteristics of the four countries and capital cities of the United Kingdom and its surrounding seas

Place knowledge

understand geographical similarities and differences through studying the human and physical geography of a small area of the United Kingdom, and of a small area in a contrasting non-European country

New requirements:

Location knowledge: name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans and to name, locate and identify characteristics of the four countries and capital cities of UK and its surrounding seas

Patterns and processesPupils should be taught to:

make observations about where things are located and about other features in the environment

b. recognise changes in physical and human features . Things that happen in the world.

Environmental change and sustainable developmentPupils should be taught to:

recognise changes in the environment

recognise how the environment may be improved and sustained

Human and physical geography

identify seasonal and daily weather patterns in the United Kingdom and the location of hot and cold areas of the world in relation to the Equator and the North and South Poles

The section in the old curriculum on Environmental change and sustainable development has been droppedNew Requirements:

Identify seasonal and daily weather patterns in the UK and the location of hot and cold areas of the world in relation to the Equator and the North and South Poles

Breadth of studythe study of two localities:

the locality of the school

a locality either in the United Kingdom or overseas that has physical and/or human features that contrast with those in the locality of the school.

7. In their study of localities, pupils should:

study at a local scale

carry out fieldwork investigations outside the classroom.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/geography-comparing-the-old-and-new-ks-1/feed/0Science: Comparing the new and the old – Key Stage 2http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/science-comparing-the-new-and-the-old-key-stage-2/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/science-comparing-the-new-and-the-old-key-stage-2/#commentsThu, 11 Jul 2013 20:49:13 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=774Click here to read this blog as a Word Document

The new curriculum for KS.2 is divided into three sections. The first two can be analysed alongside the aims and objectives of SC1: Scientific Enquiry in the old curriculum (see Table 1). The third section – Programmes of Study (see Table 2) – can be compared directly with the old PoS. To view the tables download the Word or Pdf, they don’t seem to view well on my website.

Notes on Table.1 – SC1: Scientific Enquiry/Working Scientifically

Scientific enquiry is at the heart of both programmes of study and after analysis the changes between the two curriculums in this section have been very minor (see the ‘notes’ column in the SC1 table below).

In the old curriculum scientific enquiry it is termed ‘scientific investigation’ in the new ‘working scientifically’.

Notes on Table 2 – KS.2 Programmes of Study

In the new curriculum the different units in the programmes of study are broken up into recommended years of study, these are not compulsory.

Studying electricity has been moved to KS.2 and there is more demand in Year 6 where children are required to study voltage of cells.

The study of Evolution and inheritance has been added to the new curriculum as a unit of study in Year 6

Substantial changes between the PoS have been highlighted in red on the Word and Pdf documents attached.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/science-comparing-the-new-and-the-old-key-stage-2/feed/0Science: Comparing the new and the old – Key Stage 1http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/science-comparing-the-new-and-the-old-curriculums-key-stage-1/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/science-comparing-the-new-and-the-old-curriculums-key-stage-1/#commentsWed, 10 Jul 2013 20:18:48 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=767Click here to read this blog as a Word Document

The tables below list the learning objectives from both the Curriculum 2000 programmes of study and those from the new curriculum. Changes or additions are added in the third column and the changes to learning objectives are highlighted in red (see the Word & Pdf copies).

Changes and additions to the new curriculum include:

‘Scientific Enquiry’ is now termed ‘Working Scientifically’ but seems to constitute most of the same skills. However, the learning objective for ‘fair testing’ has gone.

Some of the more obvious elements of scientific enquiry are now included in the notes and guidance. These are non-statutory.

The learning objectives for caring for animals, plants and the environment have also been dropped, although they are implied in the notes and guidance.

There is no learning objectives for teaching KS.1 children about drugs.

‘Environment’ is now termed ‘habitat’.

There is more emphasis in the new curriculum on knowing the names of different animals and plants.

The new curriculum introduces a new unit called, ‘Seasonal Changes’.

Two units have been dropped entirely: ‘Electricity’ and ‘Forces & Motion’.

These changes seem to indicate a slightly reduced curriculum load and more emphasis on the names of things: animals, plants, classifications etc. Most schools should find resourcing the new unit on seasons relatively easy, but don’t throw away the ones for electricity and forces, they’ll probably be back after the next curriculum review.

Science – Programmes of Study

Key Stage 1

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Changes

SC1: Scientific EnquiryIdeas and evidence in science1. Pupils should be taught that it is important to collect evidence by making observations and measurements when trying to answer a question.

Investigative skills

2. Pupils should be taught to:

Planning

ask questions and decide how they might find answers to them

use first-hand experience and simple information sources to answer questions

think about what might happen before deciding what to do

recognise when a test or comparison is unfair

Obtaining and presenting evidence

follow simple instructions to control the risks to themselves and to others

explore, using the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste as appropriate, and make and record observations and measurements

communicate what happened in a variety of ways, including using ICT

Considering evidence and evaluating

make simple comparisons and identify simple patterns or associations

compare what happened with what they expected would happen, and try to explain it, drawing on their knowledge and understanding

review their work and explain what they did to others.

Working scientifically During years 1 and 2, pupils should be taught to use the following practical scientific methods, processes and skills through the teaching of the programme of study content:

asking simple questions and recognising that they can be answered in different ways

observing closely, using simple equipment

performing simple tests

dentifying and classifying

using their observations and ideas to suggest answers to questions

gathering and recording data to help in answering questions.

This section is now called ‘working scientifically’ instead of scientific enquiry, although they appear to be very similar things.There are some small changes, in the new curriculum the following aspects have been dropped:

recognise when a test or comparison is unfair

follow simple instructions to control the risks to themselves and to others

explore, using the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste as appropriate

review their work and explain what they did to others.

(Although these last three are implied in the ‘notes & guidance’)

Sc2 Life processes and living thingsLife processes1. Pupils should be taught:

the differences between things that are living and things that have never been alive

that animals, including humans, move, feed, grow, use their senses and reproduce

to relate life processes to animals and plants found in the local environment.

These aspects can be found in the units below:1. All living things and their habitats2. Animals, including humans

No change

Humans and other animals2. Pupils should be taught:

to recognise and compare the main external parts of the bodies of humans and other animals

that humans and other animals need food and water to stay alive

that taking exercise and eating the right types and amounts of food help humans to keep healthy

about the role of drugs as medicines

how to treat animals with care and sensitivity

that humans and other animals can produce offspring and that these offspring grow into adults

about the senses that enable humans and other animals to be aware of the world around them.

YR.1Animals, including humans Pupils should be taught to:

identify and name a variety of common animals that are birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and invertebrates

identify and name a variety of common animals that are carnivores, herbivores and omnivores

describe and compare the structure of a variety of common animals (birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and invertebrates, and including pets)

identify, name, draw and label the basic parts of the human body and say which part of the body is associated with each sense.

Yr.2

Pupils should be taught to:

notice that animals, including humans, have offspring which grow into adults

find out about and describe the basic needs of animals, including humans, for survival (water, food and air)

describe the importance for humans of exercise, eating the right amounts of different types of food, and hygiene.

These LO have been dropped from the new curriculum:1. about the role of drugs as medicines2. how to treat animals with care and sensitivity (although included in the guidance)

These LO have been added:

identify and name a variety of common animals that are birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and invertebrates

identify and name a variety of common animals that are carnivores, herbivores and omnivores

Green plants3. Pupils should be taught:

to recognise that plants need light and water to grow

to recognise and name the leaf, flower, stem and root of flowering plants

that seeds grow into flowering plants.

Yr.1Plants Pupils should be taught to:

identify and name a variety of common plants, including garden plants, wild plants and trees, and those classified as deciduous and evergreen

identify and describe the basic structure of a variety of common flowering plants, including roots, stem/trunk, leaves and flowers

Yr.2

observe and describe how seeds and bulbs grow into mature plants

find out and describe how plants need water, light and a suitable temperature to grow and stay healthy.

These LO have been added to the new curriculum:

identify and name a variety of common plants, including garden plants, wild plants and trees, and those classified as deciduous and evergreen

Variation and classification4. Pupils should be taught to:

recognise similarities and differences between themselves and others, and to treat others with sensitivity

group living things according to observable similarities and differences.

This section has been dropped as a separate unit, but the learning objectives can be found in the notes & guidance for the new curriculum.

Living things in their environment5. Pupils should be taught to:

find out about the different kinds of plants and animals in the local environment

identify similarities and differences between local environments and ways in which these affect animals and plants that are found there

care for the environment.

Yr.2All living things and their habitats Pupils should be taught to:

explore and compare the differences between things that are living, dead, and things that have never been alive

identify that most living things live in habitats to which they are suited and describe how different habitats provide for the basic needs of different kinds of animals and plants, and how they depend on each other

identify and name a variety of plants and animals in their habitats, including micro-habitats

describe how animals obtain their food from plants and other animals, using the idea of a simple food chain, and identify and name different sources of food.

Environment is now habitat in the new curriculum.This LO have been dropped from the new curriculum:

care for the environment

(although included in the guidance)

Sc3 Materials and their propertiesGrouping materials1. Pupils should be taught to:

use their senses to explore and recognise the similarities and differences between materials

sort objects into groups on the basis of simple material properties [for example, roughness, hardness, shininess, ability to float, transparency and whether they are magnetic or non-magnetic]

recognise and name common types of material [for example, metal, plastic, wood, paper, rock] and recognise that some of them are found naturally

find out about the uses of a variety of materials [for example, glass, wood, wool] and how these are chosen for specific uses on the basis of their simple properties.

Changing materials

2. Pupils should be taught to:

find out how the shapes of objects made from some materials can be changed by some processes, including squashing, bending, twisting and stretching

explore and describe the way some everyday materials [for example, water, chocolate, bread, clay] change when they are heated or cooled.

Yr.1Everyday materials Pupils should be taught to:

distinguish between an object and the material from which it is made

identify and name a variety of everyday materials, including wood, plastic, glass, metal, water, and rock

describe the simple physical properties of a variety of everyday materials

compare and group together a variety of everyday materials on the basis of their simple physical properties

find out how the shapes of solid objects made from some materials can be changed by squashing, bending, twisting and stretching.

Yr.2

Pupils should be taught to:

identify and compare the uses of a variety of everyday materials, including wood, metal, plastic, glass, brick, rock, paper and cardboard

to recognise that when things speed up, slow down or change direction, there is a cause [for example, a push or a pull].

Dropped for the new curriculum

Light and sound3. Pupils should be taught:Light and dark

to identify different light sources, including the Sun

that darkness is the absence of light

Making and detecting sounds

that there are many kinds of sound and sources of sound

that sounds travel away from sources, getting fainter as they do so, and that they are heard when they enter the ear.

Yr.1Light Pupils should be taught to:

observe and name a variety of sources of light,

associate shadows with a light source being blocked by something.

Yr.2

Sound

Pupils should be taught to:

observe and name a variety of sources of sound, noticing that we hear with our ears

recognise that sounds get fainter as the distance from the sound source increases.

No change

Yr.1Seasonal changes Pupils should be taught to:

observe changes across the four seasons

observe and describe weather associated with the seasons and how day length varies.

New subject of study in the new curriculum

Breadth of study1. During the key stage, pupils should be taught the Knowledge, skills and understanding through:

a range of domestic and environmental contexts that are familiar and of interest to them

looking at the part science has played in the development of many useful things

using a range of sources of information and data, including ICT-based sources

using first-hand and secondary data to carry out a range of scientific investigations, including complete investigations.

2. During the key stage, pupils should be taught to:

Communication

use simple scientific language to communicate ideas and to name and describe living things, materials, phenomena and processes

Health and safety

recognise that there are hazards in living things, materials and physical processes, and assess risks and take action to reduce risks to themselves and others.

These have now been replaced with the ‘notes and guidance (non-statutory)’ in the new curriculum.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/science-comparing-the-new-and-the-old-curriculums-key-stage-1/feed/0The new Primary History Curriculum is (whisper it) really goodhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/the-new-primary-history-curriculum-whisper-it-is-really-good/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/the-new-primary-history-curriculum-whisper-it-is-really-good/#commentsTue, 09 Jul 2013 15:15:51 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=753Click here if you want to view this blog as a Word document (it might be easier with all the tables).

The history programmes of study have been the most controversial aspect of the curriculum review process. The current draft document, which is likely to become law in August with some minor revisions, is very different from the draft history curriculum published in February. These changes are likely to be welcomed by primary school teachers.

In reviewing the changes from the current National Curriculum, published in 2000, I’ve found it useful, in terms of trying to understand the differences and implications for planning and teaching, to examine both programmes of study side-by-side.

After having read through both documents it is striking how similar they are in their aims, although the content at KS.2 has some significant differences.

History – Programmes of Study

Key Stage 1

Key Stage 1: Purpose & Aims

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Differences

Chronological understanding – place events & objects in chronological order

- Know where people & events fit within chronological framework-Develop an awareness of the past & passing of time

Small change in the need for children to develop more awareness of time.

- Use parts of stories & other sources to show that they know & understand key features

This seems a small change, emphasising more the use of stories

Differences – between ways of life at different times

- Similarities & differences

No change

Representation – identify different ways the past is represented

- Some of the ways the past is represented

No Change

Historical Enquiry – use a range of different sources of information

- Understand some of the ways we find out about the past

No change

Questioning – ask & answer questions about the past

- Ask & answer questions

No change

Communicate – Select from knowledge of history & communicate in a variety of ways

This is not expressed explicitly in KS.1 but is one of the programmes of study main aims

KS.1 Breadth of Study

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Differences

Changes – own lives, family & others

- Changes within living memory, reveal aspects of change in national life

Small change in emphasis towards national events

Ways of life – people in the past, local or national

- Significant historical events, people and places in their own locality.

No change

Significant people – from history of Britain or world– for example, artists, engineers, explorers, inventors, pioneers, rulers, saints, scientists

- Lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements.e.g. Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong, William Caxton and Tim Berners-Lee, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and LS Lowry, Rosa Parks and Emily Davison, Mary Seacole and Edith Cavell

The new curriculum is more specific and offers a longer list. But is not prescriptive, the choice remains with schools.

Past events – from history of Britain or world– for example, events such as the Gunpowder Plot, the Olympic Games other events that are commemorated

- Events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally e.g. the Great Fire of London, the first aeroplane flight or events commemorated through festivals or anniversaries

Small changes.

Implications for KS.1

Displayed like this it is obvious the new curriculum will represent very little change for the teaching of history at Key Stage 1.

Note: the suggested examples for studying significant people and past events are non-prescriptive.

Key Stage 2

Not surprisingly there are more changes between the purpose and aims at Key Stage 2, but maybe not as many as you might think.

Key Stage 2: Purpose & Aims

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Differences

Chronological understanding – events, people & changes in correct periods of time

The aims for the new curriculum are taken from the over aims of history PoS & include KS3. There does seem a shift in emphasis here, but the difference relies on interpretation of ‘aspects’ & ‘nature’, both terms are ambiguous.

Diversity – social, cultural, religious & ethnic

- Gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts

This is a significant difference, the new curriculum putting much less emphasis on diversity. Although, again, it would seem to be a matter of interpretation. ‘Contexts’ is a very wide term.

- Make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses

No change

The really noticeable changes are in the units of study.

KS.2 Breadth of Study

Curriculum 2000

New Curriculum

Differences

Overview - During the key stage, pupils should be taught the Knowledge, skills and understanding through: a local history study; three British history studies; a European history study; a world history study

Overview – In planning teachers should combine overview & depth studies to help pupils understand both the long arc of development and the complexity of specific aspects of the content.

There is a shift here towards understanding how history ‘fits together’ & events from one time period affect another. However, there is no requirement to teach the different areas of study chronologically (see below).

1. Local history study- A study investigating how an aspect in the local area has changed over a long period of time, or how the locality was affected by a significant national or local event or development or by the work of a significant individual.

1. A local history studyFor example:- a depth study linked to one of the British areas of study listed below- a study over time tracing how several aspects national history are reflected in the locality (this can go beyond 1066)- a study of an aspect of history or a site dating from a period beyond 1066 that is significant in the locality.

Little change.However, it is worth noting in the new curriculum the local history study can be incorporated with one of the other history studies as a depth study, effectively making it possible to reduce the number of history studies in KS.2 to 8.

2. Changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age This could include:- late Neolithic hunter-gatherers and early farmers, e.g. Skara Brae – Bronze Age religion, technology and travel, e.g. Stonehenge
– Iron Age hill forts: tribal kingdoms, farming, art and culture

This is entirely new.

2. Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings in Britain – study of how British society was shaped by the movement & settlement of different peoples in the period before the Norman Conquest & an in-depth study of how British society was affected by: - Roman- or Anglo-Saxon- or Viking settlement.

3. Roman Empire and its impact on Britain This could include:- Julius Caesar’s attempted invasion in 55-54 BC- the Roman Empire by AD 42 and the power of its army- successful invasion by Claudius and conquest, including Hadrian’s Wall- British resistance, e.g. Boudica- “Romanisation” of Britain: sites such as Caerwent and the impact of technology, culture and beliefs, including early Christianity

Although there was always a choice between studying the Romans, Anglo-Saxon and Vikings, many schools chose to teach all three.Note, the content is only suggested & is not too dissimilar to the examples of study for the Romans in Curriculum 2000.

4. Britain’s settlement by Anglo-Saxons and Scots This could include:Roman withdrawal from Britain in c. AD 410 and the fall of the western Roman EmpireScots invasions from Ireland to north Britain (now Scotland)Anglo-Saxon invasions, settlements and kingdoms: place names andvillage lifeAnglo-Saxon art and cultureChristian conversion – Canterbury, Iona and Lindisfarne

The Anglo-Saxon and Viking Studies (along with the Romans) have now become a required part of the KS.2 curriculum. Presumably so children don’t leave primary without studying them.Anglo-Saxon history has been divided into two separate studies – before and after Alfred the Great and the creation of the kingdom of England.Presumably schools can choose to teach the two areas at different times in KS2.

5. Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor This could include:- Viking raids and invasion
– resistance by Alfred the Great and Athelstan, first king of England – further Viking invasions and Danegeld
– Anglo-Saxon laws and justice
– Edward the Confessor and his death in 1066

3. Victorian Britain or Britain since 1930 – Teachers can choose between:Victorian BritainA study of the impact of significant individuals, events and changes in work and transport on the lives of men, women and children from different sections of societyBritain since 1930A study of the impact of the Second World War or social and technological changes that have taken place since 1930, on the lives of men, women and children from different sections of society.

6. A study of an aspect or theme in British history extends chronological knowledge beyond 1066 For example: - the changing power of monarchs using case studies such as John, Anne and Victoria- changes in an aspect of social history, such as crime and punishment from the Anglo-Saxons to the present or leisure and entertainment in the 20th Century- the legacy of Greek or Roman culture (art, architecture or literature) on later periods in British history, including the present day- a significant turning point in British history, e.g. the first railways or the Battle of Britain

I’ve put the Victorians and Britain since 1930 together with this study because although they are far from an exact match there is some similarity.This unit seems a very exciting opportunity for schools to spread their wings in KS.2 and offers an opportunity for exploring a wide diversity of different areas.

4. A world history study- A study of the key features, including the everyday lives of men, women and children, of a past society selected from: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Sumer, the Assyrian Empire, the Indus Valley, the Maya, Benin, or the Aztecs.

7. The achievements of the earliest civilizations – an overview of where and when the first civilizations appeared and a depth study of one of the following: Ancient Sumer; The Indus Valley; Ancient Egypt; The Shang Dynasty of Ancient China

Ancient Egypt is back! That should please most schools. Although it is, (as it has always been), only one of a list of different options.

5. Britain and the wider world in Tudor times – study of some significant events and individuals, including Tudor monarchs, who shaped this period and of the everyday lives of men, women & children from different sections of society.

The Tudors are gone (unless you choose to teach them in the local history study or Britain Beyond 1066). In their place is a second non-European study. I suspect this is going to be the most difficult for schools to resource and plan.

6. A European history study- A study of Ancient Greece and the influence of their civilization.

9. Ancient Greece – a study of Greek life and achievements and their influence on the western world

No change

Implications for KS.2

Some of the units are familiar and schools will find they have the necessary resources and teaching expertise. Others are going to need new resource; the ‘non-European society’ is probably the most challenging in this regard.

It is very interesting that the authors of the new curriculum decided to split the study of Anglo-Saxon history into two units. This puts a great deal more focus on this period than in the past. In my experience age-appropriate books on the Anglo-Saxons do not contain the kinds of information the new curriculum requires and teachers who find themselves teaching these units may need to make a lot of their own information resources.

At KS.2 the new curriculum involves a considerable increase in content, from six to nine units. However:

The local history unit can be combined with another unit to reduce the overall number to eight.

And, significantly, the overview of the new curriculum makes it clear not all units have to be studied to the same depth: “In planning teachers should combine overview & depth studies”. The definition of ‘overview’ and ‘depth’ has serious implications for curriculum design and classroom study time and schools will probably want clarification on this matter from the DfE.

There was a suggestion during the consultation period that schools would be required to teach the history curriculum chronologically, this has been dropped. However, it would seem to make obvious sense to teach the Pre-history unit, the Roman Britain unit and the two Anglo-Saxon units sequentially and fit the other units in around them. (I’ve made a suggestion of how this might be done as a history curriculum map for KS.2).

Teaching the history curriculum sequentially will be challenging in mixed-age classes. What’s new?

Some thoughts on the new history curriculum

Despite many people’s fears the new history curriculum is not nearly as prescriptive, content-laden or Anglocentric as the original draft suggested it might be. It seems the outcry had its effect and the people in the secret committees at the DfE had second thoughts. All of which is welcome. As I hope the tables demonstrate, in terms of purposes and aims, the two programmes of study are very similar. Enquiry is still included; questioning, interrogating, organising and communicating are still considered important historical study skills; and knowledge and understanding are still at the centre of what we want to achieve.

It is a relief to see that rote learning and regurgitating dates, monarchs and battles has not become the prescribed pedagogy, although the new curriculum rightly stresses the importance of chronological understanding, coherent knowledge and placing the students’ growing historical understanding into different contexts.

If we were to search for clues as to how the history curriculum is be best taught (as there is no prescribed method) then it is worth analysing the following paragraph from subject’s purpose of study:

“A high-quality history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should:

Help pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.”

A (Possible) Curriculum Map based on the KS2 Programmes of Study for History

Rationale:

I’ve spread the eight units out evenly over the four years of KS.2, deliberately leaving the middle term of each year free. My thinking is this gives teachers a choice, either to continue the previous term’s study, start the next term’s early or plan it as a non-history teaching term.

The British study units have been planned in chronological order: Pre-History, Romans, Anglo-Saxons (before Alfred the Great), Anglo-Saxons (struggles), and a study of British history after 1066.

The local history study has been left off the map; schools can either plan a separate unit or incorporate it with one of the British history units.

I’ve put the ‘open British history study’ at the end of Year 6 because it makes sense chronologically and because it gives Year 6 teachers the flexibility to plan in and around the SATs.

The three ‘non-British’ units have been mapped with the Ancient Egyptians first, chronologically this makes sense (although of course it depends on school’s choosing Ancient Egypt as the subject of study), it also makes sense for other reasons (although these are subjective):

The cultural ‘story’ of Ancient Egypt revolves around the myth of the weighing of the heart and the legend of Seth and Osiris. These are both accessible to children of Year 4.

The iconography of wall paintings and hieroglyphics seems to hold a fascination with young children and along with the pantheon of Egyptian Gods seems more accessible than their Ancient Greek counter-parts.

The history study of Ancient Greece is focused on the achievements and influences of it’s great thinkers, architects, and story-tellers. These (it could be argued) are a much more demanding subjects and probably better understood by older children

I’ve put the ‘non-European society’ study at the end of year 5 as it seems the best compromise, but of course it could fit in elsewhere.

The National Curriculum feels like an experiment that is coming to an end. More an albatross than a carrier pigeon to the governments that nurtured it, it has failed to deliver on its original purpose of bringing enlightenment and world-class standards to our nation’s schools. The new curriculum is even worse, a sad and pathetic beast, half-made, unloved and lacking the wingspan for genuine flight: A sort of dodo made by a mad-scientist, stumbling into existence and soon to become extinct.

As if to underline its lack of appeal, Michael Gove has released Academies and Free Schools from its gawky inelegance and Stephen Twigg has promised to put a bullet in the back of its pathetic skull should he become Secretary of State after the next election. Poor thing.

But should we lament its passing? And what will come next? A sort of curriculum wacky races of private companies vying to win dwindling school funds? Who knows, and should we care?

This blog is an attempt to say why we should. It will examine what went wrong with the National Curriculum project and will argue that far from signaling the end of curriculum in schools, this could be the start of a golden age… or not.

A brief note

Before I start I have to say most of my experience over twenty years has been in primary schools. As a consequence the analysis of problems and solutions discussed in this blog will focus mainly on KS1 & KS2. I don’t want to pretend I know much about KS3 when I don’t, however, from my reading of various secondary school teachers’ blogs, I understand there have been long-standing problems with the KS3 curriculum. Whether what I write has any relevance or not to those issues I will leave to those who are far better qualified to decide than me.

The Curriculum as a lever

When we are eventually freed from the shackles of the National Curriculum what will this mean? Well, for one thing, it won’t involve much freedom. It is already clear the government, whether blue and yellow or red, has no intention of stopping their constant interference and leaving schools alone. The death of the curriculum merely signals the end of a process which has seen a switch in emphasis from curriculum leverage to summative-assessment leverage, backed up by pressure from Ofsted.

Successive governments have lost faith in the curriculum as an agent for change and have fallen in love with the long lists of numbers that give them the kind of information they need to force schools to do their bidding. As a consequence, the inspection service has transformed into a sort of grey-suited event horizon, twisting and distorting many schools’ teaching and learning practices into odd and unintended shapes and inevitably having a significant affect on decisions over curriculum design.

Any team of teachers and school-leaders sitting down to start on this process and not taking into account the requirements of SATs at the end of each key stage or the latest Ofsted inspections procedures is making a big mistake.

Which all sounds very depressing, but it need not be, we all know the function of a curriculum is more than to service the requirements of SATs. To illustrate this let’s take a look at the stated aims of both the current curriculum and the new:

Curriculum 2000 dedicates three pages to values, aims and purposes. These are the two main aims:

Aim 1: The school curriculum should aim to provide opportunities for all pupils to learn and to achieve.

Aim 2: The school curriculum should aim to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and prepare all pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life.

It also includes other ‘minor’ aims such as, “develop an enjoyment of learning”; “providing rich and varied contexts”; “enable pupils to think creatively and critically”.

The new curriculum also has two aims:

3.1The National Curriculum provides pupils with an introduction to the core knowledge that they need to be educated citizens. It introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.

3.2 …The National Curriculum provides an outline of core knowledge around which teachers can develop exciting and stimulating lessons.

Notably, both stress the importance of making learning interesting and enjoyable: “rich and varied” and “exciting and stimulating”. In fact the new curriculum puts even more emphasis on this aspect than curriculum 2000. Neither one state that schools should aim to provide “a dull and monotonous learning experience where children are drilled to pass tests.”

This is important. Despite the caricatures, the government is not calling for schools to be run in the Victorian manner: The Gradgrind cliché of the unimaginative. In fact, despite the discernible switch in emphasis from skills and creativity to core knowledge acquisition (which we will return to later), there is no change in the importance of making learning interesting or in the freedom of schools to use different pedagogical approaches as they see necessary (with one notable exception, which again we will come back to).

A new opportunity

Whether the new curriculum survives or disappears after the next election, there is no reason to think schools will become dreary factories of rote learning. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, the death of the national curriculum may herald the start of an exciting new age of innovation and experimentation in curriculum design, where schools feel liberated to explore and collaborate, sharing ideas and planning. This is both an issue of curriculum design and pedagogy, it is a mistake to think that one can exist without the other. Their interdependence has significant implications and is a matter for future blogs.

Whatever happens we must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the past. The issues of why the national curriculum never really worked are complex and run deep, it might even be argued that the problem was never in fact with the curriculum but with the way it was interpreted and taught in schools.

I know this sounds harsh, but it is not meant as an attack on teachers or school leaders or as a reflection on their good intentions or their bloody hard work – I’m not one who thinks the failure of our system is a result of people being lazy or stupid – but rather it is a comment on the result of unforeseen and unintended outcomes, which have each in their own way bent and twisted the curriculum out of shape.

I intended to examine each of these in my next blog.

– Topic as an approach to curriculum design

– Pedagogy – teaching skills & knowledge as separate entities

– Expertise and resources

– Scaffolding and differentiation

– SEN provision

– Teaching of thinking skills and SEAL as separate from content

– Delivery as a metaphor for teaching the curriculum

– SATs tests

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/07/the-curriculum-where-are-we-now/feed/0Exploring History Through Dramatic Inquiryhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/05/exploring-history-through-drama/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/05/exploring-history-through-drama/#commentsFri, 24 May 2013 13:10:10 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=732This article first appeared in the May 2013 issue of Creative teaching & Learning Magazine, it incorporates a number of photographs and other images and is therefore best read as a Pdf. To view as a Pdf click here.

Exploring History Through Dramatic Inquiry

Mantle of the expert has always been an enigmatic approach, not least because of its name, which is hardly catchy, but also because it seems to contradict many of the assumptions of how a classroom should work. Some have called it nothing more than a drama convention, others like to label it as a return to progressive, laissez-faire education. The truth is mantle of the expert resists easy analysis and is difficult to pigeon-hole. On the surface it seems quite straight-forward – establish an imaginary context, in which the children work as a team of experts, for a client who commissions the team to complete various tasks, that create opportunities for curriculum teaching and learning – however underlying this simple structure is a sophisticated pedagogic approach that incorporates drama and inquiry to create multilayered narrative threads, complex power relationships and dynamic learning opportunities.

In this article we will go step-by-step through the process of setting up an imaginative-inquiry context. We will start with a straight-forward inquiry using a painting which will establish the historical background to the work, then we will ‘step into’ the past (the world of the context) by using various drama conventions and finally we will build the expert team around the children’s ideas and developing knowledge.

The imaginary context begins with a farmer finding of an ancient Roman security box while tending his field. The box has lain undiscovered for 2,000 years, originally buried during the Iceni revolt following the Roman invasions of AD43. By using the box as a bridge into history the context is further developed by the children recreating the dramatic events surrounding its burial. It then returns back to the present as the children adopt the expert point of view as a team of archaeologists, work first outside the fiction to invent the objects hidden in the box and then working inside the fiction as the team interpreting the objects historical meaning.

To make the planning steps easier to follow I’ve divided them up into three discrete sections of approximately one hour each. This does not mean you have to teach them as three separate lessons although you may choose too.

• Painting of ‘Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar” (1899), Lionel Royer (see attached picture)

• Post-it notes – different colours (for Step 4)

• Topic box with books on the Romans and Iceni

For many of the students in your class this might be the first time they have studied the Romans and the Celts. It is likely some of them will have a bit of background knowledge, but for others it will be an entirely new subject. As a teacher I resist as much as possible telling kids stuff. For one reason, it’s too easy for them. For the second, I’ve noticed they don’t really listen until they are interested. When I’m starting a new area of study I concentrate first on getting them actively engaged in the subject, asking questions, making connections, and drawing conclusions. Once this happens then they a more likely to be receptive to new information.

To make this work I need to choose a resource that will grab their attention and, at the same time, give them a wealth of new information. Stories can sometimes do this, film, photographs, and first-person interactions with an adult-in-role. These are all useful strategies but for this context I’ve chosen a painting, ‘Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar” by Lionel Royer painted in 1899. I like this painting a great deal because it is full of dramatic tension and captures wonderfully the moment of triumph and defeat that lies at the heart of the Roman invasions. However, it does have drawbacks. The first, and most obvious, is it was painted nearly 2,000 years after the events and is merely an artist’s interpretation. The second is the Celts in the painting are a different tribe from the Iceni, in a different country. Nevertheless, the painting’s advantages (in my opinion) outweigh its disadvantages and I’ve used it many times with children of different ages who have all found it stimulating and exciting.

The following steps are a detailed outline of how I use this painting as the centre of an inquiry. My aims are:

• To engage the children in the context of the painting

• To give them time and opportunity to study it without being told what it is about

• To let them ask questions, make guesses and discuss possibilities

• To encourage them to make inferences and deductions and to begin to draw conclusions

• To give them new and detailed information (at the end) about the people and cultures depicted in the painting

Step 1: Looking at the painting

‘I’d like to show you a painting. It’s quite an old painting, but not as old as the events it portrays. When you look at it could I ask you first just to say what you notice.’

The students might try to guess what is happening in the painting. If they do, acknowledge their efforts but ask them to hold back on those thoughts for a while and just to describe what they can see as accurately as possible. Sometimes this can take a little while, but it is an important step because you want them to really ‘look’ at the painting and not yet start interpreting it.

“Hold on to those thoughts for just a moment, we will be coming back to them very quickly, but just for now can you say only what you can see. For example – I can see a man on a horse pointing empty handed to the floor towards a pile of weapons.”

As the students work help them to use precise language, as if they were describing the events in a book, without the reader seeing the painting.

Once you feel everything in the painting has been described (and before it becomes boring) move onto to the next step.

Step 2: Interpreting the painting

“In art nothing is included by accident. This is not a photograph of the event, but a painting, made hundreds of years later. The artist has thought carefully about every tiny detail and what it might mean to a person looking at it. For example, what do you make of this man kneeling here with his arms tied behind his back?”

Give the students time to talk and build on each other’s ideas. Try not to do too much of the work for them and keep back your own knowledge; let them speculate for the time being. It will be a good opportunity for you to find out what they already know. Ask questions to help them dig a bit deeper and make connections. Keep the language speculative…

“Um, I see. So you think this man might be the king’s brother. Is he hoping to free him do you think?” etc.

Step 3: Giving some background

Once the inquiry has developed it is likely the children will be ready for some answers…

“If it will help I can tell you something about this painting. It was actually painted in 1899 in France, nearly 2,000 years after the event. It depicts the surrender of a Celtic chieftain, called Vercingetorix (werkiŋˈɡetoriks – try www.howjsay.com for a pronunciation) who lead a revolt (a war) against Roman power. Here he is surrendering to the Roman Emperor, Julius Caesar. After this, he was imprisoned for five years, then paraded through Rome and finally executed.”

Give the students the opportunity to ask you questions. Be honest about what you don’t know and don’t make things up. It is important they can use you as an accurate historical resource. You can find all the information you need on Wikipedia.

Step 4: Reflection

For this next step you will need some post-it notes, ideally two different colours.

“So, what do we make of these people, the Celts and the Romans? I’m wondering if by looking at the painting, the way they are dressed, their weapons, their banners and everything else, we might be able to say something about them as different cultures. For example, what about the different shapes of their shields and their motifs?”

Your aim is to begin a discussion about the contrast between the straight, angular, lines of the Roman designs and the more rounded, organic, shapes of the Celts. Encourage the students to ask questions and make inferences about the two different cultures and what was important to them as people.

Finally, use the post-it notes to work with the students to collect their thoughts. On one colour ask them to write the things they know (or might know) about the Celts and the Romans. On the other, to write questions they would like to know more about. You could also introduce them to the topic books as they work, putting them out onto the tables – “You might find these useful…”

By the end of this session you are likely to have the makings of quick wall display with a copy of the painting surrounded by different coloured post-it notes recording the children’s new knowledge and questions.

Session 2: The Roman Box: Stepping back into history

• Some large sheets of sugar paper (to write down key questions and ideas)

• Stack of A5 paper (for the children to use)

• An adult in role (AIR) (in Step 4)

Step 1. The farmer finds the chest

Gather the class round a large sheet of sugar paper. Start drawing the outline of the box (a large rectangular shape). At the same time tell the following story:

“I’d like to tell you about something that was found in a field… it was found by a farmer, who was out ploughing one early morning. He was driving his tractor when the plough caught something hard. He knew a sound like that could spell trouble (a broken blade or something) so he jumped out of his cab and rushed round the back of the tractor to have a look. There, after he cleared away some of the earth, was a very curious thing. A large metal box buried deep in the ground, you can see the size of it, a large metal box with a curious lid. (Start drawing the two handles) The lid had two metal handles, that looked like this… he tried to turn them, but couldn’t, that had to be done later at the museum, after the box was carefully lifted out of the ground and washed clean.”

Step 2. Speculation

‘I’ll show you how the opening mechanism worked.” (Lean over the box and ‘grab’ the handles, turn them simultaneously. Show them again, and then sit back. The children might like to have a go.) “Clearly whoever put things in this box, must have thought a lot of them…’

Wait a moment and see if the students say anything. If they’re getting interested they might start making some suggestions.

Give them a little time to think, if they don’t start to speculate then guide them along, however try to avoid leading them or being ‘teachery’.

‘Someone obviously went to a lot of trouble, this box is very heavy and why would they want to bury it? When they cleared off the mud the archaeologists found wonderful engravings, carved into sides. This was not something you would want hidden in the ground.’

This is a sort of ‘fishing’ exercise. You are not after the right answer, you just want to draw the children out, giving them time and opportunity to speculate. Don’t worry if their ideas seem unlikely or fanciful, as the story-teller you can always get the narrative back on track and if someone does start to make the right connections then you have the perfect in.

Step 3. The Roman villa

“There was something else the archaeologists uncovered when they examined the site where the box was found. After some more digging they found the ruins of a Roman villa, not much left now, but what there was showed signs of fire damage. It is possible the villa was completely destroyed by fire.”

Again, give the students time to talk and speculate. Go carefully, this is all about negotiation and judging the right moment, the students don’t want to feel as though you are playing them along. They might start to join everything up, but don’t be disappointed if they don’t.

Step 4. Burying the chest

Up until now you have been holding back on information (in the same way you did with the painting inquiry) giving the children the opportunity to ask questions, make connections and imagine possible events. In this next step you will use an adult in role (AIR) to shift the inquiry from the classroom space into an imaginary historical space and build a contextual inquiry through the use of dramatic conventions.

“I just going to ask Mrs Brown if she would help us out. What we would like to see Mrs Brown is the moment just after the box was buried, but before the villa was burnt down. Obviously the people who burnt down the villa didn’t discover the box, because its here! But there might have been a moment when they were outside trying to get in. We’d like you to help us with that.

OK we’re just going to watch as Mrs Brown gets ready.

The adult then takes a position crouched on the floor, next to the box, her head down. This is a convention of drama where the role is depicted as frozen in time, like in a painting or a statue. The children have permission to stare and make observations and the role will not react.

After the class have had time to talk and the time is right you can bring the role to life with a touch on the shoulder. Starting a new convention where the person in role will listen and respond as if they can hear what the children are saying even though they are not with them. The children themselves are outside the fiction looking in, the convention gives them the opportunity to question the person inside the fiction without having to participate. It is an extremely useful teaching strategy as it allows the person in role to give important information (including curriculum knowledge) to the class without it feeling like a lesson.

Through this process the AIR should convey the following information:

• The house is being attacked and they are outside, she can hear them thumping on the door, screaming.

• They’re climbing on the roof. There’s no way out.

• When asked she should tell the children the attackers call themselves the Iceni and give them some information, she might apologise for not knowing much.

• She has buried the box to protect the things inside. They are precious, family things, and she doesn’t want the barbarians getting hold of them.

• Her husband is a general in the Roman army, he is away fighting the war, and her eldest son is with him.

Step 5. The children step in to the fiction

In this next step you will use a further convention to help the children step into the fiction, joining the woman either as members of her household or as the Iceni warriors outside.

Start by addressing the woman in the story: ‘Thank you, I think we have taken enough of your time.’

AIR returns to the still-frame, head bowed. ‘You know rich Romans were rarely alone. They had large households of servants and slaves, she might even have had other children with her at this time. If you would like to be in this picture as one of these people then we could make that happen. Is there anyone who would like to represent one of her family?’

Be careful to take this slowly. As each of the volunteers makes themselves known ask them to say who they are and to join the AIR in the picture. Ask the rest of the class to watch and interpret their choice of actions. Are they standing close? Are they worried about themselves more than the woman? Are they being protective? Etc. In this way the children will create a tableau, a moment trapped in time, just before the Iceni broke into the house and these people’s lives were changed forever.

It is unlikely all the children will volunteer to be members of the household and you will be left with a group sitting and watching those now in role. These will soon join the fiction, but be careful they might be a bit worried about being stared at. Make sure the students feel safe and protected. The aim is to have everyone involved, but not scared.

Ask those sitting outside the fiction to please stand. ‘This is the story of the night the box was buried in the ground. Desperately those people of the Roman household hid away their most precious objects in the near and certain knowledge that they would never see them again. Outside the house, the Iceni warriors – fierce and angry – gathered, preparing to break in. Watching from the shadows were the Roman people’s neighbours, terrified it would be their turn next.’

The remaining children can now choose between representing either the Iceni warriors or the neighbours of the Roman family. Allow them the opportunity to change role if they want to at any time.

Give the children time to decide where to stand. Gather together those representing the Iceni warriors. Hand them each a flaming brand. ‘We are here because we have been driven here. We didn’t choose this. We didn’t ask the Romans to take our land, enslave our people, steal our food. Each of us must protect our queen, protect our land, take this burning flame and be ready.’

Be careful not to let things rush ahead at this point. Step outside the fiction and talk to the children.

‘I wonder what the Iceni warriors shouted?’ They were angry. Terrible things had been done to them, to their people, to their queen. But the people in this house aren’t soldiers, they are ordinary people, children and servants, try and hold the moment to give the class the opportunity to think and reflect. Remember they are representing the people in the fiction, not being them. This is a chance for the children to experience in a small way something of what it might have been like, but they do not have to agree with the actions the Iceni took.

I wonder which one of us will be the first to light the fire? Be careful, don’t do this lightly… whoever it is will carry the burden for the rest of their lives, there are women and children in this household, innocents. And slaves who have chosen to die with their Roman masters… I wonder if there are any among us who have doubts?’

‘Two thousand years later we know the Iceni did it, [Note, the shift in language to distance the students from the action] we can see the evidence, and I doubt they would ever admit it, but in their own hearts, some of the warriors might have been reluctant about doing this, to innocent people, this is not noble, not the same as facing your enemies. Looking them in the eye. I wonder what happened to them to make them do such a terrible thing? To act in such a terrible way.’

Here is a chance to hear from the Iceni. Again hold the moment using convention and ask the warriors for their voices. You might want to structure it by using a line which all the warriors can repeat, something like: “I am here…”

– “I am here to avenge my family.”

– “I am here because the Romans burnt our crops.”

– “I am here to kill the invaders.”

“And what did the neighbours do? Were there any among them brave enough to speak out? To try and stop what was happening in front of them?”

Throughout this inquiry give help and support to the students and give them opportunities to help and support each other. The idea is not too ‘load’ them with the guilt of the people they represent, but rather to create a dramatic situation that will create different points of view and different attitudes. The use of the conventions can help the students to pull back from the events themselves and to re-interpret them from the distance of history.

Step 7. Reflection

Once the dramatic-inquiry is over bring everyone together again.

“What did you make of that? Did it have a sense of authenticity? I mean could you imagine it happening?

“What did you make of the Iceni warriors? And the neighbours, I wonder if there was anything they could have done?

Gather the class together. Put the picture of the box on the floor. “I wondering what it’s like opening something like this for the first time in 2,000 years…

Give the students time to think and talk. “I mean for the archaeologists, working in the museum. I guess for them its like a time capsule, something that is going to teach them new things about the past. I suppose some of the things in this box will be familiar, but others might be completely original, the first (or should I say, last) of their kind…

“What do you think? I mean, if we were the archaeology team, what do think might be in here? I’m guessing not just gold. When we heard from the lady who buried it, she didn’t say treasure, she said precious. Precious I suppose means something different in this context. I remember her saying they were important things, important to her and her family because they held memories and she didn’t want the barbarians getting their hands on them.”

“And they would be precious to us as well, as the archaeologists… but in a different way.”

All along during this monologue it is important to be slow and thoughtful, as if the thoughts are just coming to you as you speak. Be patient and give opportunities for the students join in with thoughts and ideas of their own.

“We’ll have to wear our gloves. If the box is air tight, the artefacts won’t have been exposed to any air for 2,000 years. If we are very lucky there might even be some surviving parchment… Have you got your cameras ready? After we take the objects out, one at a time, they will have to be photographed and researched…”

Pick up the A5 paper and start handing it out…

‘You can use this paper to draw pictures of the things you find. Please use the books here (point to the topic books) to help with your research. You might find some of the objects within their pages.’

Step 9. Research

You will need a selection of books and pictures out on the tables. There are many good topic books on the Romans, but you might also want to make up a collection of fact sheets.

Repeat as you hand out the (A5) paper: “Please take of these, for the photographs, you might find the books on the tables useful. Could you please make a drawing of the photograph of the object you are looking at from the box. Please include as much detail as you can. We don’t want to miss anything important…”

As the student’s start to work, help them out where needed. Try and hold the fiction, as much as possible, although you might need to step out of role if you have a child who is really unsure. “Um, have you looked in the books? You might find something that looks like one of the objects from the box in one of those. If you do then a quick sketch would be very helpful.”

Remember the students are authoring and inventing, not pretending to be archaeologists. As they work extend their thinking; “Would you mind please writing next to your photograph what the object is and what (if any) use it had.”

Once the objects are drawn collect them together on the evidence table. You can extend this activity by creating (with the students) the other tools and equipment used by the team. Alternatively, you could bring in real equipment: gloves, tweezers, magnifying glass etc.

Provide some feedback and invite thinking. Remember, this is not ‘show and tell’ and try not to praise. Try to find the language ‘inside’ the fiction. It’s often worth practicing before hand. Something like, “There is more here than we could have ever hoped for. And so varied. Some of these artefacts are beautiful, look at this ring for example, and others just plain and ordinary, like this child’s wooden toy. What’s clear is there is a real mystery at the heart of all this. Why put all these objects in a security box and bury it in the ground? Do you think they meant to come back for them? They must have been important… but why?”

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/05/exploring-history-through-drama/feed/0The tolerance of ambiguityhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/the-tolerance-of-ambiguity/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/the-tolerance-of-ambiguity/#commentsSun, 28 Apr 2013 12:46:59 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=725This blog started life as a comment on Debra Kidd’s article for #blogsync – Progress? It’s more complicated than they’d have you believe! however, as it grew I thought it might deserve a place of its own and so have decided to also publish it here and add it to the #bogsync list.

Brian Edmiston prefers complex to complicated and I think I agree. Complicated is what the data-trackers, progress mapping charts and APP assessment forms (unintentionally) make of the process of evaluating progress. They are tools of empirical science that want to take shifting, complex processes and re-interpret them as a matrix of data.

The purpose of this is to give teachers, schools, parents and inspectors clear objective information for assessment, tracking and accountability.

All good sound motivations. Unfortunately, rather than simplifying matters, they actually make things far more complicated and ironically do more to deflect teachers from the real practical purpose of teaching and learning than almost anything else.

This paradox is wonderfully captured by a metaphor from Donald Schön, shared by Roo Stenning @TheRealMrRoo, pic.twitter.com/zXa2serveC

Edmiston argues educationalists need to embrace complexity – what Dorothy Heathcote called developing a tolerance of ambiguity – and actively resist models that look to define complex social reality into data-sets and reduce progress as steady linear growth.

The development of data-tracking software has had an unintended effect on lesson evaluation and by extension teaching practice, by reducing the complex messy process of learning into an objectively measurable and observable phenomenon. This outcome pretends to invest inspectors with super-human powers of observation and has terrified many teachers into game-playing the whole teaching and learning process for the purposes of accountability.

This does a disservice to the practice of pedagogy and damages the link between useful formative assessment and genuine learning experiences. Pushing (a very unhelpful metaphor) children up linear, objectively defined and measured, pathways often results in confusion and stress as learners are introduced to new learning before they have grasped a sufficient understanding of the last.

Empirical progress mapping has its place and is important for accountability and for giving broad indicators over time, but it is always contingent and always liable to critical analysis. After all behind the numbers are human-beings not rolling stock.

Becoming an expert teacher who can make expert professional judgements of children’s progress takes time and practice in the classroom. APP and other systems can help in this learning process, but they are not a substitute for the expert opinion of a teacher who knows the learners well and can make a thousand informed observations and evaluations every hour and use this information to adapt, innovate and respond as a result.

Let’s not confuse assessing progress for formative learning, with record-keeping for accountability.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/the-tolerance-of-ambiguity/feed/1Some questions for the authors of the National Curriculum reviewhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/some-questions-for-the-authors-of-the-national-curriculum-review/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/some-questions-for-the-authors-of-the-national-curriculum-review/#commentsTue, 09 Apr 2013 15:58:33 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=719The 16th April deadline for submitting a reply to the DfE’s consultation on the draft National Curriculum is rapidly approaching. There has been a great deal of discussion over the past two months over the form and content of the document, principally in regards to the primary history curriculum.

Unfortunately the national debate over the new curriculum has been overshadowed by the Blob controversy, which has created an unfortunate division within the profession between those supporting Michael Gove’s perceived advocacy of more ‘traditional’ direct instruction methods and those supporting more ‘progressive’ cognitive-thinking methods. This has not been helpful and has distracted the argument away from where the real focus should be.

What we should be asking is, is this document one that can be used by schools to design a practical, coherent and effective education? In other words, is the new curriculum fit for purpose?

The following questions are the ones we should, as professionals, be asking the authors of the curriculum:

1. Is the new curriculum practical?

Can it be used to plan from?

Can it be covered in the time available?

Are the programmes of study appropriate for KS1 & KS2?

Do teachers have the relevant knowledge and skills to teach the POS?

And if not, is the DfE planning to support and fund the appropriate training?

Is the timescale for implementation (Sept. 2014) realistic or driven by political expediency?

2. Is it coherent?

Has it been properly researched?

It is designed with a coherent philosophy of teaching and learning?

Does the content match the expected outcomes?

Are the different subjects of the curriculum part of a coherent whole or do some areas interfere or contradict others?

Are the POS designed to match the assessment methods?

Is there a consistent and coherent model of learning appropriate for primary aged children?

Do the POS contain prescribed methods of teaching, something which the Secretary of State for Education has consistently said will not be included in the New Curriculum?

3. Will it be effective?

Will it provide children with a broad and balanced education or are some parts of the curriculum preferred above others?

Will children be challenged by the curriculum?

Are the programmes of study appropriate to the age and development of all learners or will some children be left behind?

Do the POS allow children to develop through stages – developing understanding in one stage before moving onto another or is the drive to move children through the stages to keep pace with their age?

Will the new curriculum raise standards in all areas of education, across the curriculum?

Will the new curriculum prepare children for KS3 and for life after school?

These questions are highly debatable and would need a good deal of time to answer. The 16th April deadline is far too ambitious and there needs to be a much longer period of consultation, with far more opportunities for proper open discussion, among a much wider group of participants – something like the Cambridge Review maybe.

We know Michael Gove has postponed the date for publishing the English, Maths and Science curriculum subjects in the past, we need to put pressure on him now to do the same again for the wider curriculum review. If you share this view then please add your name to the petition being organised by Debra Kidd – @debrakidd – you can find more details on her website – Love Learning.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/some-questions-for-the-authors-of-the-national-curriculum-review/feed/0Open letter to all teachers concerned by the draft National Curriculumhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/open-letter-to-all-teachers-concerned-by-the-draft-national-curriculum/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/open-letter-to-all-teachers-concerned-by-the-draft-national-curriculum/#commentsTue, 09 Apr 2013 14:20:11 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=716This letter was originally published by Debra Kidd – @debrakidd – on her website Love Learning

Many teachers contacted Debra asking if they could add their voices. This is her response.

If you wish to sign the petition adding your name to the protest please contact Debra through her website.

Calling All Teachers

Dear All,

Please find below the first draft of a letter which we hope to distribute later this week. We are hoping that 1000 teachers and educational professionals will add their support. If you would like to add your name to the letter you can either do so by emailing me or adding comments to the twitter link or facebook link you came to this page from. Email address is debrakidd68@gmail.com Please state your name, job title (eg Teacher/Headteacher/AST/Teaching Assistant) etc and the sector you work in (Primary/Secondary/Academy/Private/FE/HE) etc. We are hoping to have a full cross section of teachers from all sectors and phases. Please feel free to offer amendments and ideas on the comments pages below. Please retweet/share to anyone you can think of. And thanks.

THE REAL ENEMY OF PROMISE….

Before the Easter break, almost 100 academics drawn from the spectrum of educational research and practice, published a letter in The Independent querying the wisdom of Michael Gove’s changes to the curriculum. The response from the Secretary of State for education was astonishing to say the least. He claimed that the academics belonged to a sinister ‘blob’ dedicated to ruining the lives of children. He claimed that they were Marxist. He called them, and anyone who might associate with them, ‘enemies of promise’. On Question Time, he glibly noted that he could find 100 ‘good’ academics who would agree with him. To date, he has not. The 100 academics, on the other hand, have found support in the teaching profession and beyond. Around 1000 of them have attached their names to this rebuttal. They are people working in and with education on a daily basis. Many of them are also parents. They are drawn from primary, secondary, FE and HE sectors; from state schools, private schools, grammar schools and academies. They are tired of the way that educational research is being misappropriated by the current secretary of state. They are tired of a ‘yadda yadda’ approach to this crucial job – if I hear something I disagree with, I’ll just shout over it. They are astonished that a man appointed to serve the education system behaves like a child who has not yet learned to listen and to respect boundaries.

Michael Gove has used, frequently, the words of cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham to support his notions that the curriculum should be based on the acquisition of facts. Gove’s interpretation of this idea is that the curriculum should consist of nothing but facts, but Willingham argues in much of his work, that critical thinking is essential in learning and that all knowledge learned should be supported by thinking. Futhermore, he warns that in the United States, a similar programme led to teachers ‘giving children lots and lots of facts at the expense of critical thinking.’ Far from attacking thinking skills, as Gove suggests, Willingham values them, when taught within context and points out that ‘we’d love to test critical thinking if we knew how to test critical thinking. But we really don’t. So what we tend to do is test factual knowledge.’ It is hardly a ringing endorsement of the education secretary’s approach. Indeed, all of the academics and teachers listed at the end of this article would fully support an education system in which children acquire knowledge, but it is how this knowledge is acquired and tested which forms the bone of contention. The education of our young is too important to leave to opinion and ideology. It requires evidence and thought.

This was a position that Michael Gove adopted when he came to office. He appointed ‘experts’ to advise him. Some of those experts have signed this letter. Others have publicly voiced concerns about the way he has ignored their evidence. Let’s take the expert panel on the National Curriculum as an example. In the report that the panel submitted, there was an entire chapter, based on decades of research that oracy underpinned academic success. This can be quite hard to understand if one considers that few examinations take a verbal form, but our written thoughts stem from the speeches we form in our heads. In order to be lucid on the page, we need to be lucid in our minds and practising the articulation of ideas is key to this. It is one of the reasons that the private sector places so much emphasis on debate. It is why Oxbridge universities continue to fund the hugely expensive tutorial system. It is why many of our leading orators – and Michael Gove is one of them – hone their skills in a debating society such as The Oxford Union. It is why we interview people face to face for jobs. Think for a moment of a working life in adulthood in which presentations, participations in meetings or any other form of communication was not essential. Research shows that vocabulary in child hood is a key indicator of future academic success and that building vocabulary and articulacy is essential in bridging that gap between children from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds. This chapter has been completely ignored in Gove’s proposals. In fact most of the advice offered by the panel has been ignored, leading to the resignation of all but one of the original expert panel.

Policy on literacy was based on the advice of two well known experts in the way children develop reading skills – Debra Myhill and the teaching of synthetic phonics – Ruth Miskin. Both have voiced concerns in the past few weeks at the way the government has ignored their advice. They describe the tests as ‘flawed’ and warn that they will lead to ‘poor teaching’. Indeed the DfE’s own research paper into ‘what works’ in teaching children to read warns against teaching and testing grammar ‘out of context’. So, Mr. Gove, where are your good academics – the ones who agree with you? They cannot all be enemies of promise.

Mr. Gove’s oratory skills and his ability to tap into the deepest fears of parents mean that his policies often find support in voters whose access to information is viewed through the lens of a privately educated media. These fears are seated in a belief that standards are falling and that Britain is failing to compete internationally with other systems. But if one explores the data from the OECD – the organization who administers the international PISA tests, we find some interesting ideas which do not at all sit in accordance with Michael Gove’s policies. Firstly, the tests are not based on knowledge, but the application of knowledge in ‘novel situations’. The highest performing countries have students who are able to think critically and innovatively to apply the knowledge they have. The OECD data throws up some other interesting facts. For example when the factor of class is removed, British state schools outperform private schools. In the highest performing countries, teachers are more highly valued than any other profession – in Finland for example, rather than being viewed as ‘enemies of promise’, they set and mark their own tests, are all educated to Masters level and enroll on university courses which are more competitive than Medicine or Law. In fact, the key unifying characteristics of those successful countries is the autonomy of the teaching profession and the regard in which it is held. It is difficult to see how Michael Gove’s attacks on the profession, or his changes to the curriculum help us to compete on an international stage.

It is difficult, when one reads the research written by those that Michael Gove admires, including the Marxist, Gramsci, to find the evidence that supports the highly selective interpretations that Gove incorporates into his policies. He glibly makes statements, presented as facts, which have no basis in reality at all. His statement that ‘you cannot be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed’ denies the existence of childhood and yet it is delivered as a fact. If challenging this anti-intellectual reasoning makes us bad academics, or raising our concerns makes us bad teachers in the eyes of the Secretary of State, then so be it.

Let us repeat that we do not oppose the acquisition of knowledge. Nor do we oppose the idea that all children should succeed. We instead question the removal of skills from that process. We question the wisdom of the decontextualized testing of knowledge and the notion that there should be high stakes testing in which children’s futures become fixed once and for all. Michael Gove’s proposals for examination changes are akin to altering the driving test to the theory only examination and removing the option to retake the test. Despite the fact that it took six attempts for him to pass his own driving test, in schools Gove proposes the removal of second chances and mistakes. It amounts to the removal of hope and that is the real enemy of promise in this debate.

Debra Kidd

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/04/open-letter-to-all-teachers-concerned-by-the-draft-national-curriculum/feed/2A system where good people, do bad things, for the right reasonshttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/a-system-where-good-people-do-bad-things-for-the-right-reasons/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/a-system-where-good-people-do-bad-things-for-the-right-reasons/#commentsSat, 23 Mar 2013 12:48:17 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=684This morning I read a post on the Guardian website from another ‘Secret Teacher’. The article was a heart-felt groan of frustration and professional angst from someone who was doing bad things, for good reasons, and watching children suffer as a consequence.

Later in the comments section, a contributor (@jadedjogger) asked: “Yes. It’s an own-goal by the teaching profession. How did we get here?”

This also sounded heart-felt and made me think.

This is my answer.

I don’t think people in education do bad things for bad reasons, but our education system is poorly designed and built on internal inconsistencies. As a consequence the sad situation described in the Secret Teacher article is unhappy familiar to many of us.

From the late 70s politicians have taken an increasing interest in ‘running’ education.

They have done this for good reasons (generally) – because they believed through their management and guidance the educational outcomes of children could be improved and, by consequence, the economic prosperity of the country. There is some evidence to say they have been marginally successful in this.

However, education turned out to be far more complicated and difficult to manage than anyone knew. For example, some argue the single most important factor in the educational success of a student is the educational attainment of his/her mother. Not something easily changed by government policy. Further, other significant factors – family, peer group, community, and economic background – are also something very difficult to effect through direct intervention.

So, as this realisation grew inside the DfE, they decided the only part of the equation they could directly influence was schools.

At the same time, another well-meaning group of people started to have an influence in government, they called themselves the ‘Delivery-Unit’. The Delivery Unit were made up of mathematicians who believed sincerely and honesty the more data we have, the more we can manage the system and generate effective outcomes. This view has grown in prominence in the preceding years and has had a profound influence on our school system – directly and adversely affecting children’s experiences in school and teacher’s professionalism.

This, let me stress is an unintended outcome. I’ve met Michael Barber, he seems a very nice man. I don’t think any of the people involved in designing the new system of data collection and analysis wanted to make people’s lives’ worse – quite the opposite – but it happened because the system is far more complicated and difficult to understand than their systems allowed. As a consequence, what we are in the middle of is a huge social experiment, the hypothesis being: “Will focusing on raising standards improve educational outcomes for children and the economic success of the country?” We might also ask – “If it does, at what cost?”

To collect, analyse and communicate the new data the system started to invent new procedures and methods of measurement; these were seized on by politicians as tools they could use to influence schools and affect change. A big frustration for a series of education ministers was how ineffective their policies had been, this they blamed, not on their policies, but on ineffective teachers and resistant schools. The new data and their publication as league tables (and later as a main focus for inspections) was seen as the way schools could be forced to follow government policy. This development continues to grow.

At the same time, there were others, within the system who were concerned by the new focus on data and were arguing the department should be promoting a new professionalism with better trained and autonomous teachers. As a consequence many teachers engaged in research and schools became far more interested in pedagogy and cognitive science. There was a growing realisation, among the profession, that many of our teaching and learning strategies where outmoded and in need of reform. Although the situation is still far from perfect, there have been great strides forward in this area over the last 15 years.

Further developments also happened during the 90s and 2000s and by the end of the last Labour government there was an almighty ‘struggle’ happening within the system as the best way to move education forward, between those promoting the ‘standards agenda’ and those promoting curriculum and pedagogical development. It is a mistake to think there is a consensus within the establishment, in fact there is a war, which is why we constantly hear contradictory messages from the DfE, Ofsted and HMI.

So, what has this all got to do with the poor children and teachers in the article above? Simply, they are the ones that suffer. The architects of our education system, whatever their motivations, have through accident and lack of understanding created a climate where good people, do bad things, for the right reasons. And often hate themselves for doing it.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/a-system-where-good-people-do-bad-things-for-the-right-reasons/feed/0Draft Curriculum as a word cloudhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/draft-curriculum-as-a-wordle/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/draft-curriculum-as-a-wordle/#commentsTue, 12 Mar 2013 11:24:05 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=663Just out of interest I put both the draft national curriculum and the current 2000 curriculum into a word cloud generator – a visual representation of the most common occurring words in the two documents – below are the results. Unsurprisingly the word ‘pupil’ appears a great deal in both.What appears to be immediately different is the importance of the word ‘learning’, in the curriculum 2000 cloud ‘learning’ is the second most common occurring word, in the new draft curriculum it seems to have disappeared altogether, replaced I guess by ‘study’, although that also appears in the Curriculum 2000 cloud.

‘Taught’ is another word appearing frequently in both documents, but by ‘teachers’ only in curriculum 2000. ‘Skills’ is another dimension prominent in curriculum 2000 that seems to have disappeared almost entirely from the new curriculum. Other words prominent in curriculum 2000 and less so in the new curriculum include: ‘Activities’, ‘develop’, ‘appropriate’, ‘support’, ‘information’, ‘opportunities’, ‘ideas’, ‘design’, ‘planning’ and ‘language’.

In contrast ‘words’ has become much more prevalent in the draft curriculum, along with ‘spelling’, ‘number/numbers’, ‘fractions’, ‘requirements’, ‘statutory’, ‘programme’, ‘read’ and ‘key’.

I’m not rushing to judge the new curriculum, and have no interest in defending the current one, however these word clouds do seem to suggest a significant change in focus between the two documents. In particular a new emphasis on being taught specific knowledge, although not necessarily by teachers.

It would be interesting to hear other people’s views. Please comment below.

Following the publication of the draft curriculum there has been a great deal of discussion (particularly of the POS for History), the following is a short selection (if you know of any important articles or blogs I’ve missed please let me know in the comments section below):

Finally, Toby Young has also written a number of blogs on the subject, but because hasn’t added anything useful to the debate I can’t bring myself to show his links to the ones above. But if you’re really desperate you can find most of them here, all except the ones in the Daily Mail. There are limits.

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/2014-national-curriculum-review/feed/0Dispatches from Palestinehttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/dispatches-from-palestine/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/dispatches-from-palestine/#commentsMon, 11 Mar 2013 12:23:15 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=645Luke Abbott has been working in Palestine for the last three years with the Qattan Foundation, training teachers and teaching in schools to develop exciting and meaningful experiences for students using imaginative-inquiry. Working with very limited resources and through a translator involves unique challenges and experiences. In this blog Luke describes one day’s work in a primary school in Jericho.

It is 5.00 in the morning and I am awake, listening to the Mullahs outside my hotel in Ramallah. I am also planning my day to work in a school in the desserts of Jericho that is famous to Palestinians. It is made out of car tyres covered in mud and serves the Bedouin community. I

After an impassioned plea from a member of the Jericho Bedouin community to Qattan in the summer, who feel they feel they might have been forgotten, my good friend and colleague Nader Wahbeh who works with Qattan immediately made contact with the thought that the project we are involved in should stretch from Jerusalem to Jericho.

The class, of 7 to 9 year old children and the Qattan team will all be there. Nader as the research person and brilliant liaison person and of course my dear friend Kefah who has long stood as my simultaneous interpreter.

The Jericho school I am told is very compact and has around 30 local children who attend. So, what can an affluent British teacher teach in such circumstances, and avoid the label of colonialism by any other name?

Since Qattan have commissioned me to support teachers in the region using drama for learning I am thinking through the possibilities………….Best to have one up my sleeve as well just in case……….I will prepare a context in my head that involves an image I woke up with this morning, that of a stranger seen in the far dessert distance, waving his hands in a deliberate crossing motion then disappearing.

I will offer them The Stranger. It is for me always difficult to project into a new situation in teaching. I have learnt by fire the error of not being prepared in any way and letting it all happen! I can think through the sequences of dramatic action if I pan for The Stranger and it may give the class more to go on in an instant. I can now imagine myself with them. The first steps and the negotiations. I will draw an outline of a high plateau similar to the ones around Jericho on a large sheet of paper.

This will enable us to create the dramatic imagination.

06.22 getting ready for the day ahead now, quick shower and breakfast (Arabic dark coffee essential) and to be picked up by Nader at 07.30 to get to Jericho after transferring to a taxi at 8.30. Some of the journey at the end I hear will be off road to get to the school.

We have taken the rickety road to Jericho through Qalandia junction. This is the notorious Israeli ‘check point’ and well worth a read on the net just to see what everyday life is like under occupation. We arrived at 8.45 at the Bedouin community of Al Khan al Ahmar where their school is situated. After a quick look round so the children could get a look at this very white haired individual, we began the work at 9.05.

The story of the man caused great excitement and the mystery began immediately. Where could he have gone? Could he really simply have disappeared? Nader was just right, representing the witness. The children immediately suggested he must have gone on a boat, or down into a cave or even perhaps in a car? One student was pretty sure he had gone down into a volcano…………so what next?

We had large rolls of paper, lots of very large new markers, scissors and art crayons. I suggested that maybe we could draw what we thought as well? Within seconds, the pens were distributed by the class with fantastic sharing skills and the job of the drawings started. We were all astonished at the power and speed of the class as well as their inventions.

My job was harder than I thought as the class had to see their ideas in practice and all had to be translated by Kefah. The children were also summoning up large stores of uninvested creativity and drawing with such energy it seemed as if they had an unquenchable thirst to give their outpourings a conduit.

Our next step was to contact the man in our story. My task to enable the class to ask questions of Nader was hard as well as they all wanted to show him their drawings… However slowly-slowly, we managed to explain our thinking to him.

The trouble was how to get there? Lots of talk together in Arabic and again.

Mustafa suggested we should all go to the mountain by balloon and headed straight for the pens at the same time as the words came out of his mouth.

He and a few of his friends definitely had the idea by now. We invent something then draw it. He insisted on turning the paper with our first drawings over (in order to conserve it).

All of the adults were much quicker by now too-we got the paper to them in seconds this time and the big balloon drawing event started in earnest.

In no time, at all, we were being hauled into the air and swift winds took us out of the classroom sheltered awning to the true outside…what excitement.

We arrived at the mountaintop (aka school yard usually used for football) all together and started to look for clues on the ground covered by stones of 2 different colours dark grey and white.

One very fearless girl (Iman) saw a clue in the stones……….was this the cave perhaps or something else? Electric activity ensued as we witnessed the class creating the outline of a door with white stones.

Our next task together in groups now was to create the objects down below as we had with the door. They were at it again. Getting one idea and making it happen all over the stoned area. Beautiful shapes of a ship emerged, then a car then the volcano! All meticulously created and cleaned of anything inside the shape, so in minutes we had the imagined objects the man used to get out of his land this time on the ground.

Our next task was to find the ‘people in the mountain’ and gently introduce us as those who meant no harm. We were here to help and we thought the Man who Signalled was asking for help. The class were immediately informed they were right by one of the adults who asked if they could deal with a wild lion that was rampaging around the inside of the mountain.

First, the leg was found by Arwa, (white stones made with great care and attention to the detail of the curve of the leg) then the back leg, made by Ahmed in a similar fashion, then the head (huge stone) then the teeth, then the body. Everyone was finding bits of the lion all over the place!

What a strange land……….. We soon realised together we had created the whole lion and luckily it was asleep. Good time to kill it now; ‘as it’s helpless’ say many of the boys. The girls also agree. Our science team are getting very excited. Look how much science we could investigate here………body parts, organs, species, zoos.

(We must again remember the children are used to killing predatory beasts, wild dogs have been seen as well as fox, eagles and wildcat for example. All of these are creatures are known, attack and eat newborn goats and sheep.)

We discovered that the person wanted us to take it to a zoo-but at the moment there was no such place under the mountains………well of course the class had the answer……….take it back to our land then build the zoo under the mountains later on!

Therefore, carrying the lion in its sleepy state we took our balloons and the lion home and had a well-deserved rest till the work started again. We were ready for the lunch break and the taxi was called from Ramallah to be with us in half an hour. I am not ashamed to say that the experiences affected me deeply at a gut level as I have said already. Reflecting on the writing, we did for the Head Teacher’s day book in English and Arabic gave us the chance to retell our experiences in a different way.

Luke Abbott

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/03/dispatches-from-palestine/feed/0Some thoughts on the draft National Curriculum for History in Primary Schoolshttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/02/programme-of-study-for-draft-ks2-history-curriculum/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/02/programme-of-study-for-draft-ks2-history-curriculum/#commentsFri, 08 Feb 2013 20:22:34 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=624Key Stage 1

The KS1 Curriculum is divided into three sections:

Vocabulary

Concepts

History studies

Vocabulary

The section on vocabulary seems a straightforward and reasonable list of words children should know and understand by the end of Year 2

Simple vocabulary relating to the passing of time such as ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘then’ and ‘now’

Concepts

In contrast, many of the concepts in this section better belong in the Key Stage 2 programmes of study as they are abstract and require different examples for children to begin to understand. The key phrase is: “begin to develop an understanding”. It is not clear from the draft if this refers to the concepts or only to the “key features”. We need some clarification on this. I would suggest the following alterations to the draft:

Children begin to develop an understanding of the following concepts at Key Stage 1:

Monarchy, war and peace, nation

And the following (among others) at Key Stage 2

National history, civilisation, parliament, democracy.

History Studies

There are three history studies for teachers to plan. They are quite prescriptive – predominantly about Britain’s national history – but are also quite open to interpretation and could be enjoyable for children to study. There would seem to be enough room for teachers to plan other history subjects (such as dinosaurs) outside of the prescribed curriculum. The three history studies are:

1. The lives of significant individuals in Britain’s past who have contributed to our nation’s achievements:

Scientists such as Isaac Newton or Michael Faraday,

Reformers such as Elizabeth Fry or William Wilberforce,

Medical pioneers such as William Harvey or Florence Nightingale,

Or creative geniuses such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Christina Rossetti

2. Key events in the past that are significant nationally and globally, particularly those that coincide with festivals or other events that are commemorated throughout the year

3. Significant historical events, people and places in their own locality.

Some clarification over exactly what is required would be helpful on the following:

What does such as and or mean? It seems to read that teachers have a choice either to choose individuals from the suggested list and/or to add others who do not appear. The latter would allow more flexibility.

The Key Events study seems so wide open it is difficult to understand what they had in mind. Some non-prescriptive examples would be helpful. I’m struggling to think of one that fits all the criteria: “significant events nationally and globally, coinciding with festivals or other events, commemorated throughout the year.” Bonfire Night? But that’s not an international event. VE day? Not really something children would understand without studying WW2. When is that? End of KS3?

Key Stage 2

The current KS2 History curriculum is already very large, but is as nothing to this new proposed programme of study. It is shorter than Curriculum 2000, but fewer words do not mean less content or more flexibility.

Some thoughts:

It is incredibly prescriptive; with so much content there is very little flexibility or opportunity to study any history off the list.

It is very anglophile, concentrating almost entirely on English history after Year 3.

With so much content it is difficult to imagine teachers will have the time to teach for the depth of study required for real understanding. There is a genuine danger the history curriculum will become a ‘skim read’ for most children, especially if they are having regular ‘catch up’ sessions in phonics and numeracy.

Teaching the chronology of British history sequentially is a good idea, however by trying to cram everything many children will be confused.

There is a real concern this ‘do as much as possible’ approach will mean children will be taught history by straight-forward transmission teaching and, as a result, they will become bored and stop enjoying the subject.

It seems very unlikely children will have the time or opportunity to develop the critical thinking and historical inquiry skills listed in the curriculum’s Purpose of Study: “A high-quality history education equips pupils to think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.”

The Key Stage 2 history curriculum seems half-baked and ill thought through. It lacks a basic understanding of either pedagogy or child learning and seems driven by ideological dogma rather than a genuine appreciation of how history should be taught. The subject aims are noble and achievable but are hamstrung by a behemoth of content.

With so much content to cover and with (rightly) ambitious aims there would seem little choice but for Primary Schools to turn over large amounts of their academic curriculum at KS2 to the study of history. As a consequence many will have to adopt a cross-curricular approach teaching English, Maths, Geography, Art, Design and Science through the lens of a history study. I’m not sure this is what the architects of the new curriculum hand in mind, but there are only so many hours in a week and teaching so much history content will require a great many of them.

The KS2 history curriculum can be divided into 15 distinct history studies. There is a requirement to teach of the ones that cover the chronology of British history in a sequential order. Beginning with Stone Age (c.25,000BC) in Year 3 and ending with The Glorious Revolution (1668) in the summer of Year 6.

In addition children in KS2 will also be required to study the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome.

While studying these different periods of history the curriculum requires children should:

be taught the essential chronology of Britain’s history,

be made aware that history takes many forms, including cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history,

be taught about key dates, events and significant individuals,

be given the opportunity to study local history,

be given the opportunity to study local history.

The KS2 programmes of study seem to be divided into four categories:

cultural studies,

history studies,

historical individuals,

historical events.

The POS seem to divide into 15 different periods of history (Note, I’ve divided the Stuart period into two different studies partly because the early and late Stuart periods are separated by the commonwealth and partly because this allows them to studied in more depth by Year 6 students over two terms, especially as the Spring Term is often distorted by SATs):

1. Study of the ancient civilisation of Greece

2. Early Britons and settlers, including:

the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages (Cultural study 25,000BC – 43AD)

Celtic culture and patterns of settlement (Culture study)

3. Roman conquest and rule, including:

Study of civilisation Ancient Rome (history study)

Caesar, Augustus, and Claudius (historical individuals)

Britain as part of the Roman Empire (history study)

the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire (history study)

4.Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlement, including:

the Heptarchy (history study)

the spread of Christianity (culture study)

key developments in the reigns of Alfred, Athelstan, Cnut and Edward the Confessor (historical individuals and history study)

]]>http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/02/programme-of-study-for-draft-ks2-history-curriculum/feed/4Children learn best when they use their imaginationhttp://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/02/children-learn-best-when-they-use-their-imagination/
http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/2013/02/children-learn-best-when-they-use-their-imagination/#commentsWed, 06 Feb 2013 13:23:53 +0000http://www.imaginative-inquiry.co.uk/?p=621First published on the Guardian Teacher Network 5 February 2013

As a child I loved games. Playground games, skipping games, card games, board games like Risk and Colditz, obscure data games like Logacta and, most of all, role-play games, where I could imagine being someone else involved in dangerous and exciting adventures.

My love of games continued into adulthood and when I became a teacher I wanted to use them in my lessons to engage and excite my students. In this purpose I was incredibly lucky. As a first year teacher I met Luke Abbott, adviser and former student of drama and education specialist Dorothy Heathcote. Luke and Dorothy taught a demonstration lesson with my year 1 class using imaginative inquiry.

Within a few minutes of the lesson starting the children and Luke were involved in a full on mission to rescue the inhabitants of a village, which had been swallowed up by a giant hole. Children who I knew well (some of them reluctant learners) were working in active collaboration with each other, sharing ideas, talking animatedly, drawing, writing and making plans. My classroom no longer looked like a traditional classroom, heads bowed, teacher at the front, but more like a functioning workplace with people operating together as a team. Learning was happening everywhere, all at once, not in a tidy linear way; objective, success criteria, activity, plenary, but in a complex, multi-levelled, environmental way. It was emerging in all directions, both from the children and the adults, driven by the needs of the context.

For me it was a revelation and I’ve spent the rest of my career learning how to teach like Luke and others who use this approach.

What I recognised that day was Luke and the children were involved in a game. The rules were obscured by the way they worked, subliminal, not discussed or agreed, but there nonetheless. And allowing Luke to create with the children an imaginary place inside my classroom, a place where people where trapped underground, and needed rescuing, and a place where a rescue team made plans, collected equipment and went into the darkness. As part of my observation I made a list of the curriculum learning that was happening during the lesson: making maps, writing notes and signs, planning, questioning, working in collaboration, discussions on rocks, soils and materials, light and darkness, respiration, lengths of rope, angles, distances, counting, adding, subtracting, and multiplying. Early years teachers will recognise huge swaths of the key stage 1 curriculum.

In follow up sessions the children wrote reports of the rescue, newspaper headlines, letters of thanks, poems of remembrance, safety leaflets and instruction manuals. Over the coming weeks, following on from Luke, I was able to teach almost the whole year 1 curriculum through a single context and the kids loved it.

Fast forward 20 years and I’m working with a class of year 6 students. The context we have developed over the previous weeks is a Tudor house, now a museum, but once used by Henry VIII for a secret meeting with Anne Boleyn. Winding back history, the children are waiting for Henry’s arrival by river on a barge (think A Man for all Seasons). Henry has been corresponding with the people of the house and has made it known he wants time alone with Anne away from his wife Catherine and his chancellor, Thomas More. The household are, understandably, nervous; dealing with a king as notoriously short tempered as Henry is a terrible worry.

As the session develops the children organise themselves into factions, each one representing different points of view within Henry’s court. Those within Henry’s household that support his wish to divorce Catherine; those within his household who don’t support the divorce, those that represent Anne’s household, and those that represent Catherine’s. Within each household are those that are loyal and those that are looking to exploit the situation for their own ends.

The session comes to head when Henry (represented by a boy called Ryan) dismisses Thomas More (represented by a boy called Simon) from his household because Thomas refuses to give him what he wants. The moment is electric; Henry/Ryan lifts his hand and points at the door, Thomas/Simon bows and leaves. As he goes the other members of Henry’s household (who have waited for this moment) crowd round his chair and take his place. Simon comes out of the story, he’s furious, close to tears. “Why would he do that?” he asks, “I’ve been his friend for years.” The rest of the class are just as animated. Some argue from Henry’s side, others from Thomas’. What is clear is this matters; they are genuinely bothered. This is not an academic study, dispassionate and objective, but a real argument, respectful and reasoned, but also heated and heartfelt.

A lot has happened in education since I started teaching: the literacy and numeracy strategies, Ofsted, league tables, international comparisons, three changes of government and countless education ministers. But what still holds true (in my mind) is that children learn best when they are engaged in their learning, when it matters to them, when its contextualised in meaningful ways and when they have a sense of ownership and agency. The best learning I’ve been involved in has not been ‘delivered’ to a class, but built, over time, in collaboration with students. Explored, examined and argued over.

The curriculum is a dry document, full of the kinds of knowledge, skills and understanding we as a society believe are beneficial for children to learn. By all accounts the next one is going to be even dryer. But, however boring and prescribed the curriculum becomes (and of course the tests) there is no reason for our pedagogy to be the same. In fact, Michael Gove and Michael Wilshaw are at pains to make this very point. I believe we should take them at their word.

As a profession we should renew our efforts to research and develop modern, engaging and effective teaching methods. Ones that incorporate recent understanding of how the brain learns, help children develop the skills and aptitudes they need for a rapidly changing world and build on the work of our profession from the past.

Imaginative inquiry is based on a well-researched pedagogy with a long history of practical application in the classroom. Teachers use it in many different ways, some as a single lesson, others as a year-long project incorporating wide ares of the curriculum. It is a flexible approach that most teachers find, once the context is established, is easy to plan and resource. However, getting a project started can involve a substantial amount of detailed planning which can be difficult and time consuming. For this reason we have written up a number of popular contexts into step-by-step by guides to get teachers started. You can find these on our website.

I agree with some of this but not all. Over the years you meet lots of different kinds of learners. It was once said to me that I was a better comedian than teacher. I think it was a compliment.

The truth is that no matter how funny you are, how engaging your sessions are learning at it’s most basic is a cognitive process.

That process may be locked into a social context, it may require the agency of the individual permanently locked into an ongoing relationship with peers and the objective knowledge (often pointless) proffered by the curriculum but in the end learning is as much about reflection and the construction of knowledge at a cognitive level.

We are prisoners of both social knowledge and neuroscience; the I and the me.

And so in truth I know that I have delivered as many interactive happy clappy sessions, which looked great but where nothing much of anything was learned as I have dry sessions that were a bit boring and where nothing much of anything was learned.

Learning takes time, it takes an immersion of the individual into a learning environment that con